Using Gillian Beer's suggestion that literature and science 'share the moment's discourse' (Open Fields, 1996), this thesis explores the ideas associated with Albert Einstein's three revolutionary 1905 papers, examining the ways in which similar concepts appeared across disciplines during the early part of the twentieth century, and focusing in particular on their manifestation within the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. The study seeks to distinguish between instances of direct influence and a shared contemporary discourse, arguing that the analysis of both is essential to studies within the field of literature and science. Part I focuses on concepts of duality and complementarity, considering Max Planck's introduction of the quantum, Einstein's development of light quanta, Louis de Broglie's wave-particle duality and Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. It analyses other contemporary discussions of duality and complementarity, and explores Virginia Woolf's attempts to simultaneously express both sides of dualistic models, suggesting that Woolf is a complementary writer. Part II focuses on Einstein's theories of relativity, exploring D. H. Lawrence's adoption thereof in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in particular his claim that 'we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity'. It argues that this proposed theory is directly relevant to Lawrence's fictional works, both those that precede Fantasia and those that follow it. It also analyses the impact on Lawrence of contemporary ideas of relativism, especially those of William James as expressed in Pragmatism (1907). Part III explores the ways in which both Woolf and Lawrence write about individuals within crowds. It considers the possible links between such scenes and Einstein's paper on Brownian motion as well as contemporary studies of crowd psychology. It suggests that individual characters within modernist works can be considered as similar to the individual particles suspended in a mass which exhibit Brownian motion.

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This dissertation examines the collegial and collaborative relationship between the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars and the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s as an exemplar of shifting literary influence in the international modernist moment and examines how each writer’s later accounts of the modernist period diminished the other’s influential role, in revisionist histories that shaped later scholarship. In analyzing a broad range of source texts, published poems, fiction and essays as well as personal correspondence and preparatory materials, I identify several areas of likely mutual influence or literary cannibalism that defied contemporaneous expectations for literary production from European cultural capitals or from the global south. I argue that these expectations are reinforced by historical circumstances, including political and economic crises and cultural nationalism, and by tracing the changes in the authors’ accounts, I give a fuller narrative that is lacking in studies approaching either of the authors in a monolingual context.

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This project explores the ways in which several Welsh writers, and English writers of Welsh descent, respond to and reconstruct the related notions of Britishness and Welshness during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Saunders Lewis, David Jones, and Kate Roberts each reveal nuances in perspective during this period in which the British Empire reached its peak and required popular justification for doing so. Each author also participates in a form of Modernism, whether mainstream or specific to literary trends in Wales; in each case, such Modernisms are defined by an embracing of Welshness as an alternative to Anglocentric modernity. Through employing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity as it relates to ethnicity, this project contribute to the fields of Postcolonial Theory and Welsh Studies through evaluating how these authors construct and perform identity markers in the late 19th and 20th centuries for political purposes. Applying these critical paradigms to the four authors shows how constructions of ethnic identity serve political ends – particularly in relation to how collective national identity responds, whether through resistance, participation or some combination of the two, to the broader aims of the British Empire. / Department of English

This thesis argues that the popular characterization of high modernist fiction as esoteric, elitist, uncommunicative, and far too difficult for the common reader obscures the democratic principles at the heart of modernist experimentation and its poetics of difficulty. Recent theories of embodied cognition when applied to representative examples of high modernist novels help dispel the myth of inaccessibility and reveal the many ways in which these works actually accommodate the common reader. Once the stigma of inaccessibility is removed from the study of modernist novels, it becomes possible to see how their formal experiments with language as well as the themes and issues they contain operate for readers and writers alike as a means of exploring everyday cognitive activities and responses. To this end, the concept of cognitive dissonance provides a heuristic device for understanding what lies behind the motivations of writers who aestheticise experiences of dissonance in their texts and the responses of readers who confront these texts. This cognitive approach to modern literature challenges assumptions about high modernism's "uncompromising intellectuality" and replaces them with a view of modernism that is more accessible and inclusive without diminishing its radical difficulty. It also paves the way for new readings of highly canonical modernist fiction. For instance, I examine how James Joyce places "inscribed" readers into Ulysses to guide actual readers through some of the difficulties of the novel. I then read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a novel that both thematises and formally resists the modern threat of behaviouristic human conditioning. Finally, I look at how the theme and form of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway reinforce the embodied equation of dissonance with illness and incompletion.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-180).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-240).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.