The mass media portrays traditional forms of marital status in contemporary films despite changing demographics. This thesis argues that romantic relationships are presented as a normative and significant part of completing a predetermined life course in adulthood. Specifically, recent films are entrenched with ideological messages regarding heterosexual marriage and fail to represent singles adequately. In Canadian society, legal marriage is becoming less frequent, common law relationships are increasing, family formations are more diverse, and individuals are happily choosing to be single. Therefore, it is crucial to explore if the media, a powerful socializing agent, communicates a preference for marriage by promoting the ideology of marriage. A content analysis was performed on nine top grossing films that were released in 2010. Overall, the findings demonstrate that regardless of changing demographics, the media privileges marriage and marginalizes singlehood. These films contribute to strengthening traditional ideologies of marriage and family and reinforce discrimination against singles.

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There is an extensive body of work in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and sociology which identifies a specific world view based on the following criticism of modern society: that people live monocerebral existences divided from their physical, emotional, and intuitive abilities. In this state, the capacity for affect -emotional response - is believed to be atrophied, and experience nullified. Such a condition - which may be loosely termed 'mind/body split' - results in a diminished ability to relate to other people, a sense of alienation from the world, and a pathological loss of human capacities. Many psychologists believe that this state prefigures neuroses, destructiveness, and schizophrenia. This thesis is concerned with the concept of 'mind/body split' and its relation to affective communication in the theatre. The subjects of my enquiry are theatre practitioners or companies whose work has directly addressed these issues: Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, The Living Theatre, The Performance Group, The Open Theatre, Peter Brook, and Eugenio Barba. My aim has been to re-examine the work of these seven in order to produce evidence of their concern for affect, heightened experience, and the healing of mind-body schism. I propose that an understanding of these concerns provides a major critical key to the appraisal of the practitioners in question.

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Iconoclasm has proved to be a major feature in modern British drama, where in a short period of time, the theatre has witnessed a host of iconoclastic dramatists, where demythologization has been widespread and fierce and where the icons of the present and the past have been subjected to a wholesale desecration in large numbers at the hands of the Ardens, Brenton, Bond, Churchill and others, who, as their dramatization of history and its idols has shown, have much in common. Although the above playwrights and others were most active towards the end of the sixties and throughout the seventies, their assault, however, has not completely died away in the eighties. As I have shown, Berkoff in 1987 launched in Sink the Belgrano! a fierce onslaught on political sacred cows, including the present Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher who was mercilessly pilloried. On the 19th of February, 1988, Radio Three began broadcasting a nine part iconoclastic cycle by the Ardens, Whose Is The Kingdom? in which iconized personages from Roman history are revealed in a new light. In the above cycle, the playwrights set out to "demolish" "established notions" about Christ, Christianity, and rewrite the history of the Roman Empire, exposing its heroes and icons such as Constantine as manipulators and hypocrites. In other words, the Ardens' iconoclasm does not seem to have subsided; indeed it is on the rise! However, as mentioned earlier, iconoclasm is not merely the result of petty spite; it is a major aspect of political drama. It works towards changing the received images that the audience hold of history, the present and their icons the latter of which represent both the former. However, like the political theatre of which it is part, iconoclasm has failed to achieve its objectives for a number of reasons, foremost of which is the fact that the denigration of a historic idolatrized figure amounts to attacking the audience itself in whose mind, the images of those assaulted are deeply ingrained as holy and untouchable. The audience sees in such figures its own reflection. Lindenberger, in his book Historical Drama rightly argues that historical playwrights could "present a historical character or action within a broad framework of accepted notions". In other words, a playwright dramatizing a historical figure should try to adhere as much as he can to what is handed down to him and to his audience about the figure by history. Lindenberger goes on to say that "Historical material had the same status as myth, both belonged to what Horace called 'publicly known matters' ... and both depended - indeed, still do depend on - an audience's willingness to assimilate the portrayal of a familiar story or personage". Any portrayal of Achilles as not "restless, irascible, unyielding, and hard" would appear to the audience as unacceptable. The above theory can be rightly applied to the iconoclastic modern British playwrights' treatment of venerated persons. The audience would certainly stick to the “accepted notions" about Lord Nelson, Queen Victoria, Sir Winston Churchill and others. Plays such as The Hero Rises Up, Early Morning, and The Churchill Play can only arouse indignation in the audience and not a renunciation of received images. As I have shown, many spectators and critics were offended by, say, Arden's treatment of Nelson or Bond's degradation of Queen Victoria and William Shakespeare. The audience would rather adhere to what it already knows than revise its views, which brings to mind Marx's statement about the spell that the past casts upon the people, "The old has a strong grip on the people and, progress proceeds slowly." "Tradition is a great retarding force, is the vis inertiae of history". "The tradition of all past generations weighs like an Alp upon the brains of the living”. However, although they may be considered to have failed politically to dislodge right-wing iconography, the modern British demythologizers have established iconoclasm as a major trend in modern British drama and have revived an old tradition and consolidated it . Bond, a playwright who has constantly since 1968 called for the renunciation of the past .and its icons is, however, only too aware of the difficulties that his iconoclasm faces, yet as we Mire seen, he has not stopped producing iconoclastic plays. In his play, The Bundle, his revolutionary hero, Wang works hard with his fellow rebels to rid themselves of the past. He eggs them on to think of the future. For that purpose, he narrates to them the story of a man who carried the king on his back all his life, who even "did not know the king had died long ago", and who "carried him always and wasted his life", He goes on to say that the worst thing is "to carry the dead on your back", What the iconoclasts have tried to do during the past two decades is to remove that dead man from their nation's shoulders.

The thesis adopts a structural and systematic approach to the study and analysis of colour terms in Flaubert's fiction.The Introduction highlights how Flaubert has come to be regarded as a problematic writer and how much existing work on his colour terms is in some way lacking in clarity. I proceed to fill this gap in Flaubert studies by elaborating a method of analysis of colour terms which clarifies how meaning is produced by the text. The method of analysis comprises eight stages which are systematically worked through as one considers eleven variables, one or several of the latter coming into play at any stage in the method and which may influence the ultimate type and degree of value-charge carried by a colour term. The method and the variables should be thought of as one ensemble or a methodology for the analysis of colour terms in prose fiction. The methodology is highly refined and is without precedent in that I examine the dual exchange of figurative charging which is always operational between a colour term and its associated referent.The thesis is divided into five chapters where each text is studied separately. The Oeuvres de Jeunesse are experimental writings and Flaubert is testing the figurative potential of colour terms. The chromatic codification is mainly traditional, though a nascent private elaboration may be discerned. Madame Bovary represents the peak of literary perfection. All the novel's colours contribute to the overall illusion/reality dichotomy which lies at the heart of the text.

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In the context of changes in British theatre theory and practice, in particular in the post-1968 Fringe, is it possible to consider playscripts as literary works,expressing the views of individual writers? The emphasis within the early Fringe was on collectively organized workshops and group creativity, and on the exploration of non-verbal expression on stage, something which had been anticipated by the pre-1968 avant-garde and which amounted to a challenge to the playwright's traditionally dominant position in the theatre. However, the playscript, as an example of written fictional narrative, dependent on the theatre for its realization but not its creation, still commands an independent status as a work, and the fiction enables the playwright to explore and evaluate reality in his own terms. Snoo Wilson's works illustrate his clear awareness on the power of fiction to posit the equal reality of the rational and the irrational in dramatic terms, as a metaphor for our way of understanding reality outside the theatre, where reality and fiction seem difficult to distinguish. David Hare focusses on the discrepancy between fiction and reality in the way we experience our lives and interpret history, and he seeks, as a conscious story-teller, to reveal, in imaginative terms, how that discrepancy leads to actual suffering. Howard Brenton's declared preference for content and fact, rather than form and fiction, and for the theatre as a democratic medium, cannot conceal his consistent endeavour to use fictional narrative as fantastic as Wilson's to oppose bourgeois versions of reality. In spite of their having learned to work with theatre companies and, hence, come to see themselves as parts of a larger, complex art, these playwrights, like their predecessors, continue to write fictions which express their personal vision in a form, print, that is accessible and analysable in isolation from actual performance.

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