Thesis (M.M.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Mar. 01, 2010). Creative project (M.M.), 3 hrs. Includes bibliographical references (p. 22-23).

The reception of O'Hagan's Tay John and that of Lowry's Under the Volcano is compared. Although both authors were familiar with avant-garde modernist writing and art, O'Hagan buried his sophisticated allusions and presented himself, not as a well-educated lawyer, but as a "mountain man." Lowry appealed to a much wider audience.

Literary creativity and its shadow, the phenomenon popularly referred to as writer's block, have historically been accorded little attention by literary studies. In my thesis I seek to redress this oversight, illustrating my argument with reference to the creative life and works of Malcolm Lowry. I begin by arguing for a model of literary creativity that takes seriously the roles played by plans and intentions in motivating, sustaining and appropriately terminating literary creative action. I employ this model in order to provide a basis from which to clarify Lowry's own creative method. / I go on to rehearse and evaluate definitions and theories of writer's block from a variety of research paradigms. From these accounts I distill some important general features of writer's block. I argue that writer's block typically occurs as an intervention between stages of the literary creative process. / Finally, I return to detailed consideration of Lowry's creative method. I investigate three critical periods of writer's block in Lowry's later life and examine these interventions with reference to circumstantial, methodological and goal-based considerations. I conclude by drawing attention to the importance for literary studies of an accurate and comprehensive understanding of both literary creativity and writer's block.

Known in the United States for his critical studies of twentieth-century fiction, Malcolm Bradbury is himself a creator of fiction, the author of four novels. All four are satires. All confront well-meaning but feckless English liberal humanists with the doctrinaire. All reveal that meaning well and doing justly are not the same, and that private values--a belief in the dignity of the individual and in his right to work out his own destiny--are insufficient, even, sometimes, harmful. Yet Bradbury consistently reveals the doctrinaire as far more harmful, concerned not at all about individual men. The doctrinaire is ruthless and inhumane, whether presented as a formulaic version of liberal humanism itself, in Eating People is Wrong (1959); as the politicized liberalism of post-McCarthy America, in Stepping Westward (1965); as the radicalism of the early nineteen seventies, in The History Man (1975); or as the Marxism of a Soviet satellite, in Rates of Exchange (1983). His novels all depict something that Bradbury himself named in a commentary upon his first: "an ironic world, a world without real deliverances." Several critics maintain that Bradbury's novels are profoundly, deceitfully, conservative beneath a surface liberalism. However, as this first long study of the novels attempts to demonstrate, their conservatism is not so much political as cultural. The great Western systems, capitalism and communism, no longer offer much that is conducive to man's well-being; only liberal humanism, in its respect for the individual, holds forth some faint hope for humanity. So implies Malcolm Bradbury, whose stance in the novels is largely apolitical and who exposes the folly of his liberal humanists and the wickedness of their more doctrinaire antagonists with equally devastating wit. / Department of English

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / It was John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow (1821-1911) who conceived of English Christian Socialism and convinced many contemporaries of its value. He was responsible for establishing the Christian Socialist producer co-operatives of 1849-50 in accordance with ideas gained in France from the socialism of Louis Blanc and Benjamin Buchez. With F. D. Maurice, John Ludlow shares the credit for founding a college for the education of working men (still in existence as the Working Men's College of London). As a lawyer, Ludlow acted as constant legal advisor to the great 19th century organizations of self-help: labor unions, friendly societies, and co-operatives. [TRUNCATED]

Since its publication in 1947, Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano has been gaining in reputation until it has come to be regarded as one of the masterworks of this century. The aim of this thesis is to consider Under the Volcano in the light of the Romantic and Symbolist tradition in which it belongs, and to provide an interpretation of the novel through an exploration of its structure, symbolism and theme. Chapter I attempts to demonstrate that an understanding of the world view which Lowry adopts in Under the Volcano - the doctrine of universal analogy, which had such a profound influence on the nineteenth-century Romantic and Symbolist writers - is essential to an appreciation of the formal design and the theme of the novel. Chapters II and III examine the implications of two of the major symbols of Under the Volcano - the wheel and the abyss — and attempt to show how these symbols function on several levels to support both the narrative sequence and the mythic framework of the novel. Some attention is paid to the metaphorical identification of the protagonist with the archetypal ‘suffering hero,’ especially in relation to the Promethean and Orphic imagery employed in the novel. Chapter IV is concerned with the tragic stature of the hero, particularly as it is revealed in the culminating scenes of the novel, and with an examination of the paradoxical resolution of the central conflict - the struggle between love and death. The Conclusion contains a brief review of some critical comments on the novel and modern literature in general, which may contribute to an appreciation and understanding of Lowry’s achievement in writing Under the Volcano. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Although his literary reputation rests primarily on his novels, Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) considered himself a poet, and he composed an extensive poetic canon. No reliable edition of Lowry's poetry exists; increasing critical interest in all aspects of Lowry's life and work prompted the preparation of this complete edition of his poetry, in which the poems are located, identified, dated, arranged, collated, annotated, and explicated in biographical, critical, and textual introductions. The sections of Lowry's text are chronologically arranged to reflect his artistic development, and are preceded by short essays describing the specific issues raised by those poems. The opening section—Lowry's poetic juvenilia—reflects his fascination for the sea, as does the ensuing section, The Lighthouse Invites the Storm, his first collection of poetry, a sequence of related semi-autobiographical poems, which depicts the adventures of the characters Peter Gaunt and Vigil Forget. Lowry composed most of the Lighthouse in Mexico; following it in this edition is a small group of uncollected Mexican poems. The next two sections of text—"Dollarton 1940-54: Selected Poems 1947" and "Dollarton 1940-54: Uncollected Poems"—reflect and record the experience of Lowry's sojourn on the lower mainland, and its deep effect on him. A remarkably coherent group of love poems written between 1949 and Lowry's death in 1957 follows the Dollarton texts, and the appendices contain sections of song lyrics and undated fragments. This edition provides Lowryans with ready access to the latest determinable authorial versions of, and the textual histories for, the canon's four hundred and sixty-five poems, which range in date from 1925 to 1957. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Between 1936 and 1946 Malcolm Lowry produced a succession of versions or revisions of Under the Volcano. He began this lengthy undertaking in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and continued it in Los Angeles—where he moved in 1938—and Vancouver, British Columbia to which he moved just prior to the outbreak of war in 1939. In 1940 he submitted what he considered at the time to be the final version to a number of major and minor publishers, all of whom had rejected it by 1941. During the same year, having moved out of the city of Vancouver to the nearby squatter's settlement at Dollarton, Lowry re-commenced to revise the novel. By Christmas of 1944, after thousands of pages of revisions, he had more-or-less completed another "final" version, and a retyped copy of this was accepted in 1945 for publication early in 1947. In general, the many successive post-1940 versions of the novel show only minor alterations to the basic story or plot of the rejected version. But Lowry re-presented this fundamental story in such a way that the overall effect of the novel published in 1947 was extremely different from that of the rejected 1940 version. In the course of this post-1941 revising of the novel, Lowry made a great many marginal annotations. As a rule they recorded his immediate feelings or thoughts about some aspect of the draft version he was considering at the time. Examination of these notes reveals a pattern of motivation lying behind Lowry's gradual representation of the novel's basic story. On the one hand, his critical notes ultimately expressed dissatisfaction with a melodramatic and allegorical view of the world implicitly held by the narrator of the pre-1941 versions of the novel; on the other, his strategic notes complemented this criticism by recording his local attempts to represent the novel's basic story from a philosophically and psychologically more complex point-of-view. It also becomes clear during examination of Lowry's marginalia that the earlier narrator's implied view of the world was profoundly neurotic. And the structure of this neurosis precisely paralleled a neurosis evident in Lowry's own view of the people around him prior to 1941 and his move to Dollarton. Regarded in this light, Lowry's marginal notes appear to record not only a creative aesthetic development but also a creative re-vision of his own personality—a movement away from his own neurosis that he achieved by means of his literary engagement. In the final analysis the personal and literary undertakings must be understood as a single integrated process; the record of Lowry's revision of Under the Volcano is thus an extremely detailed example of precisely how literary creativity can be understood as therapy. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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