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This thesis examines the character of the schlemiel in comparative Jewish and Gentile American literature and cinema. It is the central claim that whilst the schlemiel is a strong Jewish character type this figure also appears in the texts of other socio-cultural groupings to an ever increasingly degree. With this is mind the character is examined in relation to the contemporary Western world, or Postmodern society.To achieve this aim the study is divided into three sections. The first deals with traditional perspectives on the schlemiel, examining prior definitions and gives a brief historically linear overview. Key examples are given to provide `case studies' in both literature and film. The examples chosen represent those characters considered to be archetypes, specifically Hyman Kaplan and the characters created by Woody Allen. Section Two examines processes of characterisation in literature and film to investigate whether there is anything at the most basic level of the text which identifies the traits and attributes of a schlemiel or from where an audience may derive information. This section examines a range of Jewish and non-Jewish texts via Structuralist and Narratological analysis. Section Three looks at the contemporary social function of schlemiels. Even if it is possible to clearly identify what schlemiels are their socio-cultural function remains important. The character is placed in a `postmodern' context. The final chapter develops from this into looking at the function of the schlemiel as a comic character and theories of comedy.Whilst the theoretical approaches utilised are there to test the character it is inevitable that the schlemiel will test the theories. It is the irrational and illogical nature of . schlemiebthat dictates that they will have problems fitting into the rigid patterns created by any neo-Structuralist approach such as Narratology. The character also tests rationalist responses to the `Postmodern condition' and this in turn provides a critique of the Aristotelian principles of Section Two and the socio-temporal definitions of Section One. This work attempts to provide a re-evaluation of a historically entrenched character for the late twentieth century and to provide a critique of theories, which purport to provide universal answers.

This study seeks primarily to examine three Scandinavian examples of the documentary novel. Initially I endeavour to isolate certain purported characteristics of the genre as a whole by considering which aspects of a narrative have prompted the critics to call it a 'documentary novel'. I then examine the three works in detail, applying standard techniques of literary criticism and comparing the facts on which the novels are based with the novels themselves to determine what makes them 'documentary' and what makes them 'novels'. The three novels share common techniques and all deal with the subject of Scandinavian polar exploration, but the author's relationship and attitude to the facts he has at hand are sufficiently different in each instance to permit a discussion of the literary form, ambitions and potential of the 'documentary novel'. The evidence suggests that the documentary novel uses authentic historical material but presents it through the techniques and forms of creative literature: the novelists adapt documented facts to support a view of a history which typically differs from accepted tradition. I then show that the conclusions to which this unorthodox view points, however, are invariably the same as those the authors draw about life in their other, non-documentary fictional works. Finally I demonstrate how the documentary novel is a fluid form which can be used in the service of fact, fiction or fraudulent propaganda, and I suggest a definition that embraces the three novels examined and the three kinds of documentary fiction that they represent.

As its title suggests, this study is divided into two separate but related parts. Each part of the thesis is then sub-divided into sections. Part I is evolutionary in nature, building its argument in a more linear and expository style than those sections which comprise Part II which stand in a more dialogical relation to each other and are self-sufficient in form. The title of the thesis uses the term 'psycho-analysis' as it was first introduced by Freud with reference to a systemic methodology. It should be noted that the 'textual production' to which I refer in the title should not suggest a Marxist-based analysis. Instead, it refers to the activation of the text in conjunction with its encounter with the reading subject. As such, it does not refer to the creation of an author, nor to the material production via institutions in the strict historical sense. It does, however, refer to a material affect of the signifier in its interpretative rendering by emphasizing its bodily interlinking with the imaginary of the reader in a scene which is analogous to that of hysterical symptomatology. Part I is entitled 'Psycho-Analysis' and consists of three sections which explore the beginnings of psychoanalysis, its main theories on hysteria and the relationship between Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. The theoretical base of hysteria is considered to be illuminating to analyses of critical procedures such as those employed in literary criticism. Part II is entitled 'Textual Production' and is comprised of six sections of textual readings. These readings are presented as discrete in themselves yet of an interlocking character. This study of psycho-analysis and textual production has attempted to examine the mechanisms of critical encounter in relation to the psychoanalytical text and the literary text. Theories offered by psycho-analysis formulated with reference to hysteria are considered to offer an illuminating parallel to those processes which occur in critical practice.

This study examines the functions of Bronte's "scribblemania" at each stage of her intellectual and emotional development, as well as the narrative forms, many originating in the exceptional visual qualities of her imagination, which she employed to shape her thoughts into fictional correlatives. Young Bronte, while indifferent to contemporary fiction, aspired to become a painter, and looked upon her prose writings as a diary. Between 1829 and 1833, she recorded her visions of the realm of artists and poets in which she hoped one day to participate. In 1834 and early 1835, while the career in painting was becoming progressively elusive, she was baffled in her attempts to share in her imaginary Athens, but drew comfort from watching it through her narrator's eyes. During the Roe Head crisis, while at home for the holidays, she withdrew to the margin of Angria in order to allow her exhausted imagination to recover. Having failed in the later novelettes to devise a means of overcoming the burdensome reserve which shielded her imagination against an indifferent outer world, she resolved to leave Angria, but only for a while. Her half-hearted attempt to write a novel at the age of twenty-four was inspired by the hope of earning some money. In The Professor, another financial venture, she charted the struggles of an imaginative person who, like herself, was determined to win a stake in life. She returned to this theme in Jane Eyre. While writing Volume One of Shirley, she perceived a role for herself as a social reformer. The project collapsed after Emily's death. In Villette, she affirmed her faith in her memory and imagination. Three appendices discuss It is all up!, the dating of But it is not in Society (April 1839), and the dating of Bronte's letter to Hartley Coleridge (December 1841).

When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre in Washington on the evening of April 14,1865, he destroyed any possibility that his reputation as an actor would be dispassionately assessed for the foreseeable future. A bitter, fratricidal war was drawing to its close, and Northern newspapers were not interested in being fair; opprobrium was heaped on Booth's name, beginning in the press the following day. Twelve days later he was dead, shot during an attempted arrest. In 1890, his fellow player Clara Morris asserted hopefully, ‘At this late day the country can afford to deal justly with John Wilkes Booth.’ That time had not yet come: in fact, some of the worst -- and silliest -- slanders have been perpetrated in the twentieth century. But surely now, over a hundred years later, it should be possible to set aside that April evening and look dispassionately at Booth's career in the theatre of his time. As well as extending simple justice to a man who seems to have been extremely likeable and idealistic, and an actor interesting enough to deserve study, such a reassessment may serve to correct a distortion which the 'mythologized' view of his career has created: the idea that Edwin Booth was the only promising young tragedian in the early 1860s, which falsifies both Edwin's career and the period in general. Moreover, John's entire career covered a mere ten years, and his four full seasons as a star occurred during the Civil War, an under-researched period. The necessary concentration on so brief a time-span allows a more detailed treatment than would be possible in examining a career of average length, which may in turn illuminate some broader aspects of American theatre during an unsettled and transitional period.

'The plays are very interesting, but again, formless,' was Violet Hunt's criticism of Lawrence's plays in 1912. This sort of comment is fairly predictable when the formal structure of drama in England, whether from the pen of Ibsen or Pinero, was expected to conform to the tenets of the well-made play. It arises from a basic misunderstanding of the nature of Lawrence's drama which has persisted until quite recently. Just as Lawrence's inclusion of the domestic details and rituals of the miner's home has been seen not as an ordering and defining principle but as a documentary, a transcript of unordered reality, so Lawrence's plays have been viewed as formless. To hold such an attitude is to fail to appreciate the form which inheres in the plays through such an ordering principle. The sense of form in Edwardian drama tended to emanate from two different but linked sources: formal construction, plays with a beginning, a middle and an end; and a structure of received ideas, an overt ideology which informs the plays with a cohesive intellectual order. Lawrence deliberately avoided both the rigidity of construction of the well-made play and the tendency of the social thesis. Lawrence was unable to find an appropriate form in the drama of his contemporaries. and found that their form was false to the drama be wanted to write. The aesthetic and morality of the well-made play in the hands of the society dramatists is inescapably interlinked, a part and parcel of the experience they convey. The experience mediated by the colliery plays is very different from the experience mediated by the society drama and therefore demands a different aesthetic, that is a different way of defining the drama. Lawrence deliberately constructed and gave form to his colliery plays by investing them with the sense of definition which I have analysed. Lawrence disguised the treatment of his material in order to achieve an effect which has greater congruity with our experience of the unordered reality of life. Similarly he disguised the construction of his plays so that we should be unaware of an externally imposed sense of form, either the theatricality of the well-made play or the intellectuality of the social thesis. Lawrence's plays are not more real that the plays of his contemporaries, he merely utilised a different convention, a different technique. He avoided the formal exposition by making the creation of the social and cultural context its own exposition, its own explanation and definition. He avoided the conclusive ending which allowed the audience to go home feeling contented and satisfied at having witnessed Edwardian middle-class morality triumphant, or feeling smug and complacent in feeling that it had performed some social duty in having its own view of the unfairness of the social and economic system confirmed by a Galsworthy. And in so doing he created a drama which mediated a different experience. It is only when the technique of Lawrence's plays is appreciated, when they are seen as carefully controlled and consciously dramatic works, that they can be hailed as they have been as 'the only really satisfying Naturalist drama in English’ (Lilian R. Furst and Peter N. Skrine, Naturalism, p. 68).

In this thesis an examination is made of criticism of Thomas Hardy's novels from the earliest comments of his publishers and reviewers in the late nineteenth century to the apparently more sophisticated studies of the mid-1980's. The thesis is organised chronologically with each chapter dealing with a specific historical period of not more than a few decades which marks a particular phase of criticism of Hardy's novels and which often reflects more general developments in critical attitudes to the novel as an art form. Thus, while much light is thrown on Hardy's own art as a novelist in the course of this study, its wider purpose has been to trace patterns of development in the theory and practice of novel criticism over the period 1870-1985 as a whole, and to examine the ideological assumptions which have informed it. In this sense criticism of Hardy's novels is a good subject for study because it reveals many features which may be said to be typical of the various phases of novel criticism; indeed, it often tells us far more about critical fashion and critical prejudice than it does about Hardy's art. Because this thesis traces general patterns of development in criticism, there has been no attempt to be all-inclusive in the coverage of Hardy's critics; books and articles have been chosen for their representativeness or their special merit. All the major critics have been discussed, however, and the study concludes that what criticism has gained in sophistication of technique ; and mode of expression appears to have been counterbalanced by its having lost the ability to respond directly to the impact of reading a novel and by the corresponding loss of a sense that literature (in this case Hardy's novels) has any value which can be related to life. It is suggested that recent critics might benefit from a study of the methods of their predecessors so that they might learn from their successes as well as from their mistakes.

The history of music in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century is best understood within the context of the social, cultural and intellectual history of the German people during this period.The intellectual coming of age of the middle classes during the first decades of the century occurred as a result of growing confidence in the establishment of a national spoken and literary language. In a gradual progression of liberation and purification, the German language broke away from the dominant voices and cultures of its closest neighbours, leading to the crystalization of a clearly indigenous culture later in the century. Few other art forms followed this development more closely and indeed benefitted more from it than music.At the beginning of the century German music, and German culture in general, was still very much subjected to vassalage to foreign powers. Only in its church music, however, could a small but distinctly native voice be detected. With the growth of literary confidence, in particular in devotional poetry, music received considerable creative impetus. The figure who most closely followed these linguistic and literary developments is Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767).The object of this thesis is to place in its proper context the highly influential musical personality of Telemann, in particular through a study of his relationship to a younger generation of composers and theorists: the 'Berlin Circle'. In a detailed study of the composer's relationship to Carl Heinrich Graun(1703 or 1704-1759), the court Capellmeister at Berlin, the association between words and music, between musical and literary languages, will be discussed and, furthermore, they will be seen to be interdependent