The rapid modernization of Pound's poetry between 1912 and 1917, and of Williams' poetry between 1917 and 1923, can largely be accounted for by their response to literary influences. While the two poets' debt to the French has been thoroughly studied by Rene Taupin, what they owed to the Chinese has only been briefly treated in a few books. My dissertation proposes to fill up this gap by tracing their explorations of Chinese poetry in this period and identify the Chinese influence in their early works My investigation begins with a survey of Pound's discovery of Chinese Imagism in 1913. Evidence will show an immediate relation between his initial Chinese exploration and the making of Des Imagistes. Pound was inspired to write the four pre-Fenollosan Chinese poems by studying H. A. Giles. The experiment in turn encouraged him to bring together poems modeled on the Greek and on the Chinese. What he derived from the Chinese was a 'hardness' that is not seen in Ripostes. Pound's next move was toward Vorticism and Cathay. Ample evidence from published and unpublished material will demonstrate how Pound succeeds in reviving the beauty and simplicity of Li Po, and how he fails to bring out the Zen-Buddhist essence of Li Po's contemporary Wang Wei Williams' early enthusiasm for Chinese poetry remains unexplored. Evidence will testify that he began a dialogue with the Mid-Tang poet Po Chu-i, first through Giles and then through Authur Waley, between 1918 and 1921. The result of this encounter was an adoption of Chinese notion and method in his own poetry. Without this dialogue, Williams wouldn't have attained a Taoistic serenity in many of his Sour Grapes poems. As Williams evolved toward Spring and All, the influence of Po Chu-i became less visible. Scrutiny reveals, however, Chinese elements blended with elements from other traditions Though my study relies on historical data, its real emphasis is on comparison of texts between periods and cultures. My theory of influence is that affinity comes before direct influence. Pound and Williams were both prepared to receive the Eastern heritage / acase@tulane.edu

The Rhetoric Of Masculinity argues that the discourse of male American expatriate novelists in the first half of the twentieth century is shaped by their reaction to an American public that feminizes writing and expatriation. These novelists---Henry James in his late phase, Ernest Hemingway, and Paul Bowles---inherit the same relationship with their audience as a writer like Howells, but their reaction is more overtly rhetorical than the realism Howells advocates to prove the writer's masculinity. Howells responds to the writer's feminization by advocating 'masculine realism.' The American writer, in Michael Bell's reading of Howells, proves his masculinity by representing reality as his readers know it and by locating himself, as Howells did when he moved from Boston to New York, at the center of that reality. From this perspective, the expatriate writer is seen as marginalizing himself geographically and denying himself an active and therefore masculine role in the cultural construction of American realism. In 'The Art of Fiction' James argues for the globalization of realism. But in his later work, The Ambassadors, he dramatizes both his American audience's refusal to accept such globalization and the damage the artist does to himself when he attempts to conform to that audience's constructions of masculinity. In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway abandons realism for authenticity. Jake Barnes performs his masculinity not by representing reality as his audience knows it but by distinguishing between his authenticity and the lack of authenticity in his expatriate surroundings. Finally in The Sheltering Sky Bowles assaults the psychic and cultural structures that determine masculinity. Port Moresby is one of several of Bowles's characters who are psychologically emasculated or whose literal emasculation dramatizes that psychological state. Bowles's work lashes out against the source of such emasculation: in psychoanalytic terms, the father; in social terms, his native culture. Port travels to rid himself of his culture, but the novel's intimations of incest and homosexuality and its validation of silence over speech suggest a more radical rebellion against culture, namely a violation of the Oedipal taboos and a refusal of the language on which culture is built / acase@tulane.edu

James Joyce and Toni Morrison, though separated by differences of race and sex, of national and temporal context, nonetheless respond in similar ways to their different historical moments. In the wake of Irish nationalism and black nationalism, respectively, these two authors insist on the heterogeneity that is frequently repressed by nationalist efforts to produce a positive cultural image. Concerned with establishing respect for difference and otherness, Joyce and Morrison react to the political pressures of their times with an emphasis on diversity and ethical understanding Joyce and Morrison make us self-reflexive about the way in which we, as readers, engage with others by challenging our identification with their protagonists. Our interactions with the protagonists are transformed into ethical encounters with otherness as we are moved away from, but not wholly beyond, our conventional readerly identifications. In reading their novels we alternate between identification and apprehension of difference, and this oscillation prevents us both from viewing the other reductively as a mere copy of ourselves and from rejecting the other as wholly alien to ourselves. Instead, the other is maintained as other, yet within close proximity to us so that we are challenged by that difference These encounters correspond in several ways with the ethical relation as it is envisioned by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas argues for a 'distance of proximity' in which we do not seek to eradicate the difference, and therefore distance, of the other, but we nonetheless remain in proximal relation to that other. Joyce and Morrison recreate the traditional readerly space of relation as exactly this kind of 'distance of proximity.' In this dissertation, I examine the more traditional A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Song of Solomon, as well as the later, more complex Ulysses and Beloved . I see these novels as forming a trajectory in the work of Joyce and Morrison from early critiques of popular reading habits to later revisions of those reading habits. Ultimately, Joyce and Morrison create novels that celebrate radical forms of difference and that encourage our own active engagement with that difference / acase@tulane.edu

My dissertation addresses an issue central to British Modernism as I demonstrate that time in the modern British novel is rendered as a far more complex and much more socially oriented phenomenon than the traditional subject-centered Bergsonian model would allow. This model suggests time in modernism to be divided into two types: homogeneous, objective, public, clock-time and heterogeneous, subjective, private time. Moreover, according to this model, only the purely subjective aspect of human temporal experience has any significance for the modern novel, with objective, clock-time functioning as nothing more than an oppressive deterministic force from which the subject must escape. To deconstruct this reductive dualism, I use an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon literary theory, history, sociology, and philosophy to introduce a new conception of time which acknowledges the mutually constitutive interrelationship between the time of the self and the time of society and which posits time not as a disembodied subjective essence, but as a form of Foucauldian power Through close readings of novels by Conrad, Woolf, and James, I show that modern novelists respond in their fiction to the emergence of a new twentieth-century social time-consciousness, or what J. T. Fraser terms sociotemporality, by developing in their full complexity the intersubjective temporal relationships which characterize life in the modern world. In The Secret Agent, Conrad uses the Greenwich Observatory as the centerpiece for an examination of the temporal power relationships inherent to modern bureaucracies and the family as institution, as he shows how individuals must negotiate an infinite number of competing and often conflicting demands made on their time both in their public and private lives. Similarly, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf structures her novel around the chimes of Big Ben, illustrating how even the most intensely individual subjective temporal worlds are nevertheless joined together through mutually shared public temporal experiences into a larger world of social time. Finally, I argue that in The Ambassadors James uses the introduction of advertising to the international watchmaking industry as a backdrop for his dramatic portrayal of the cultural shift to a standardized international time-keeping system / acase@tulane.edu

From the years 1930-1941, the work of Virginia Woolf reveals a 'writing I' deeply involved in a crucial philosophical issue--the engagement of the self with its others in the construction of identity, hardly a new quest. Yet Woolf was a woman, working in her texts to disrupt the masculine image of woman and to dismantle the primacy of male ego. Thus, what Woolf would uncover as she caught her stride in her most mature years was a feminine identity in her texts which seeks to bond with other voices, other lives, and which finds its form in feminine language What Woolf marks most clearly during her last eleven years is the other side of a feminine rite of passage; by 1930, having written To The Lighthouse, Woolf had witnessed and transcended the death of her mother in her texts. Once she had cleared from her writing her obsessive need to resurrect her long-dead mother, Woolf was free to reconstruct in that space a model of feminine discourse based on woman as artist, mystic, writer, in a word, active. Woolf thus confronted and revised within the field of her writing the discourses of patriarchy as she searched for the place, language, and history of women in her late texts, and she anticipated the work of current feminist and postmodern theorists regarding the slipping away of meaning and being through the sieve of language. Her practice combines forms and emerges as a blurring of genres into autobiography, her major vehicle for meaning and perhaps the most suitable form for women's writing. The work of her last decade most fruitful for such a reading includes the memoir, 'A Sketch of the Past,' Roger Fry: A Biography, The Waves, The Years, Between the Acts, and Three Guineas. These texts demonstrate that in finding a feminine voice, Woolf also found the communal voice combining the self and others--narrative itself, to remake in her visionary texts / acase@tulane.edu

Lawrence Durrell has written in most of the genres of literature not just in an attempt to find his metier, but in the act of satisfying his powerful creative urge. His works include fiction, criticism, and travel literature, each undertaken in various degrees of seriousness, and for various reasons, literary as well as monetary. The quality of Durrell's work makes him suitable for critical judgment as a novelist, and for commentary on the merit of his non-fiction as well--especially his much celebrated travel recollections. Durrell's fiction, criticism, and non-fiction ofter merge in matters of style and diction, but they differ in matters of tone and objectivity This dissertation traces Durrell's success as a writer as he moves through different genres toward his masterpiece The Alexandria Quartet, and beyond. The first part reviews Durrell's contributions to literature in general, focusing on the quantity and variety of his interests and accomplishments. His chronological development as a writer, traced through his attempts to get his works published, provides the framework for this section. The second part is an extensive analytical treatment of the critical responses to Durrell's Quartet. Analyses detail each author's theme or argument, and make clear the themes, topics, faults, and the literary significance of Durrell's work. The third part analyzes Durrell's major travel works, and incorporates a critical discussion of the methodology he uses for travel literature, including structure, fictional attributes and intentions. The point of reference for this section is Durrell's essay 'Landscape and Character,' in which he defines the 'spirit of place' as it affects his work These different approaches to Durrell's work--biographical, bibliographical, and critical--make possible a broader and better understanding of the author, his works, his accomplishments as a whole, and the significance of his canon / acase@tulane.edu

Who were the angels in the theatre? In the mid-Victorian period, a remarkable shift occurred in the professionalization of the theatre, the respectability of performance, and the depiction of actresses. My interdisciplinary analysis of the representation of both historic and fictional actresses uncovers the intricate connections linking the personae of actresses and the ideology of Victorian femininity. In addition to some better-known sources, such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Charlotte Bronte's Villette, I examine less-studied works to assess the variety of ways in which the mid-Victorian actresses came to be received as respectable. By analyzing plays like Dion Boucicault's Grimaldi; or, The Life of an Actress and T. W. Robertson's Vie, novels like Harriett Jay's Through the Stage Door and Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half Sisters, and prose like Dinah Mulock Craik's A Woman's Thoughts about Women and Madge Kendal's Dramatic Opinions , this project studies a broad spectrum of representations of angels in the theatre. In addition to fictional and dramatic representations, my work examines the representations of historic actresses to illustrate how the cult of celebrity actually enabled these women to achieve social mobility. Through performances, both actual and textual, actresses began to be defined and to redefine themselves by middle-class standards of femininity. The growing number of representations of actresses as angels reveal new tensions in Victorian class and gender roles. In this project, I argue that by constantly negotiating the boundaries between the actresses' public careers and their private respectability, these depictions of angelic stars offer unique insight into Victorian culture. The repeated representation of respectable actresses exposes the anxiety inherent in Victorian definitions of class, gender, and propriety. These representations reveal the extent to which the anomalous position of the actress defied the era's seemingly strict social and gender codes / acase@tulane.edu

Literary circles in Russia have traditionally placed Platonov's works under the category of realism. In the West, he is considered a modernist by most literary scholars. This study proves, however, that both of these approaches to Platonov's works are misguided. Through careful analysis and comparison between Platonov's novels and those of Bellamy, Wells, Huxley, and Orwell, this study definitively places Platonov's novels within the framework of the Western utopian tradition. / Significantly, Platonov's prose shares with the above mentioned authors the following main themes: scientific and technological progress, the mentality of a new man, individualism versus collectivism, equality, and the effects of ideology on the collective consciousness. The study argues that the utopian dreams and visions of Platonov's early works derive from his critical reception of the most important motifs and concepts in the works by Bellamy and Wells. It also demonstrates how the author's early optimism, in the face of the tragic historical events of post-Revolutionary Russia, gradually transformed into the same disillusionment that characterizes the works of anti-utopian writers such as Orwell and Huxley. Tracing the parallel dystopian themes and techniques in the works of Platonov, Orwell, and Huxley, this study attempts to lay the foundation for a new interpretation of Platonov's art. / Using a comparative approach, this study not only shows the similarity between Platonov's imagery, conceptualization, and motifs and those of other writers in the utopian tradition, but also demonstrates how Platonov developed and enriched the ideas and literary style within it. / The study concludes that, while Platonov's early works illuminate the existing state of affairs in post-Revolutionary Russia and provide a utopian escape from history, it is his later work which establishes him as an essentially anti-utopian writer, under the strong influence of the novels of Orwell and Huxley. The profound difference between Platonov and his anti-utopian contemporaries, however, is that the Russian writer wrote with the knowledge and experience of having actually lived within the limits of a realized fantasy, that is, in communist Russia. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3152. / Major Professor: Nina Efimov. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.