Thesis--Paris III, 1973. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 429-451) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / "September 1994." Includes bibliographical references (leave 267-275).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1956. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

The poems and novels of Edwin Muir are closely linked by their themes and images, and the insights reached in the mature poems resolve the problems implicit in the earlier, less successful work. Despite its thematic unity, however, Muir’s poetry is not the expression of a conscious, systematic view of the world, but a sustained attempt to create a sense of the depths inherent in human experience. His poems aspire not towards a statement of truth, but towards a sense of total presence, in which being is infused with consciousness. The experience of presence is reached through the imaginative experience of absence, when the barriers between the mind and the world seem insurmountable. The thesis examines the growth and resolution of this dualistic vision of life, with its roots in Muir’s early experience. His years of poverty in Glasgow forced him to see man's misery and degradation, yet in his dreams he experienced states of limitless union and freedom, which seemed to show that the human being is not bound by time and circumstance. Muir's creative phase began in Germany, when his reading of German poets and novelists helped him to set his experience of suffering and deprivation within an imaginative vision of life. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

The poetry of Edwin Muir has inspired a distinctive body of criticism. Realizing that his poetry is inexorably linked with his life, Roger Knight, Michael Phillips, Peter Butter and others have produced fine studies of his work against a biographical background. Margaret Anderson has contributed an important dissertation on the importance of dualism in the poems. R. P. Blackmur, J. R. Watson and Kathleen Raine have published articles that are central in informing any new Muir scholarship.This study intends to illuminate the source of Muir's inspiration, to show that his imagery is drawn from the mythos. A general review of Muir criticism supports the theory that the imaginative background he knew as the Fable, which underlies all temporal human behavior (labeled as the Story) is also the collective unconscious of Jung, the Spiritus Mundi of Yeats, the "inseeing" of Rilke, and the Mythos of Aristotle.The study reviews Muir criticism and the poetic technique of Muir, develops a special definition of "mythos" and goes on, through the explication of selected Muir poems, to show how his poetic and philosophical growth was influenced by his unique ability to gain access to the most powerful of Aristotle's four modes of Rhetoric. Finally, the study crystalizes Muir's overall aesthetic in the oxymoronic conclusion to his 1956 masterpiece, "The Horses," the term "free servitude."Muir felt that we can only function at our full potential when we use the power of our imagination to realize the essential duality of the human condition. We are, to an extent, free, and in a state of servitude. In Freudian terms, the superego enslaves us through guilt and our debt to the concept of civilization, while the id urges us on the ultimate freedom represented by the unchecked expression of violence and sex.The study concludes with an examination of Muir's final enigmatic symbol, found in the title of his last collection of poems: One Foot in Eden. Man, through the imaginative realization of his immortality, may plant one foot in Eden; the other foot remains trapped in the Labyrinth, Muir's symbol for the bewildering, impersonal complexity of our twentieth century beaurocractic wasteland. The transcendence of this entrapment gave Muir his purpose, in life and in art.

Edwin Muir's poetic vision is bound up with that belief in a twofold structure of reality that in European culture has been called Platonist but which is so ancient and widespread that no one can determine its origins. Though no longer fashionable in a time when materialist philosophies flourish and even Christian clerics are busy "de-mythologizing" their faith, it has been the potent source of our greatest poetry and perhaps, as Kathleen Raine believes, of all true poetry. Those who hold this conviction regard the sensible world as the reflection of an "intelligible" or spiritual world which gives meaning and purpose to life, and they see the objects of nature as images that evoke the ideal forms of a divine reality. For poets, as for traditional men, this belief is less a metaphysic than an intuitive way of apprehending and ordering experience, a "learning of the imagination" inherited from ancient and mysterious sources. To Muir it came directly and spontaneously in the symbolic images of dreams, and the fact that he entitled the first version of his autobiography The Story and the Fable testifies to the importance, both for his life and his poetry, of his belief in two corresponding orders of experience. Intro., p. 1-2.

The thesis reconstructs the first sixty-five years of the life of Willa Muir, and provides a preliminary critical analysis of her pre-1955 works. Wilhelmina Anderson was born in 1890 in Montrose where she spent the first, formative seventeen years of her life before proceeding to St Andrews University in 1907. Her university years produced academic and social success, but also the pain of a disintegrating romantic relationship and the horror of her brother's nervous breakdown. She spent the later war years in London studying child psychology at Bedford College, and living in the city's East End at Mansfield House University Settlement. She met Edwin Muir in September 1918 and married him in June 1919 - a development which cost her the vice-principal's post at Gypsy Hill Training College. They spent their first difficult married years in London where Willa pursued subsistence employment and struggled to contain the fears which plagued Edwin: but they were overwhelmed by London life and escaped into Europe for three years. This adventure included a period in Prague and one during which Willa taught at A.S. Neill's school near Dresden. They returned to three frustrating years in Willa's mother's Montrose house (where Willa wrote Women: An Inquiry) and a damp Buckinghamshire cottage from which they escaped to the cheaper, warmer climes of southern France. Five years in Crowborough then ensued; Willa produced a son, an outpouring of translations and a novel called Imagined Corners. The three years which they then spent in Hampstead were amongst the happiest in Willa's life. She produced her second novel, Mrs Ritchie, but also experienced her sons road accident. This event drove them to seek a less populous location and they moved to St Andrews. This was a nightmarish period in which they suffered social ostracism, illness and the effects of the Second World War. Willa wrote Mrs Grundy in Scotland. Edwin then began an eight year association with the British Council which started with war work in Edinburgh and then took them back to Prague. This was an initially happy experience which was soured by internal machinations at the Council and the horror of the 1948 Communist putsch. They were physically and emotionally injured by this experience but were healed by a second British Council posting to Rome. The final chapter describes their residency at Newbattle Abbey College in Scotland - where Edwin was appointed to the post of warden - and explores Willa's crisis of confidence during this period. The thesis ends at the point of the Muir's 1955 departure for Harvard University. It is a natural hiatus in Willa's personal history and marks the beginning of a comparatively fallow period in her creative life.

In 1867, the budding naturalist and future father of our national parks, John Muir, embarked on his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf from Jeffersonville, Indiana, to Cedar Key, Florida. Almost 150 years later I undertook the same journey, retracing the wilderness advocate’s footsteps through the South to catalog all that has changed in a century and a half of progress, to try and better understand the inception of his environmental ethics, and to learn to see the world as he did, harmonious, interconnected, rejuvenating and imbued with a pervasive spirituality. The chapters of this thesis retell selected legs of that journey.

In Recreating Nature: Ecocritical Readings of Yosemite and Grand Canyon, I examine the intersections of culture and nature in two prominent national parks, and I consider the implications of nature-tourism in the environmental discourse of the U.S. Covering a period from 1848 to the present, my project aims to correct an oversight in scholarship about the park system, in which legacies of colonialism and imperialism--when addressed at all--tend to be historicized and framed as the age-old sins of a presumably reformed national politic. Instead, I examine both historical and present-day developments, emphasizing the profound cultural influence of the places we designate as natural. I define ecocriticism as an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor attuned to the interconnectedness of things. My methodology is to engage texts, images and other expressions of the national parks in a process of extended close reading and comparative analysis. While observing the particular contexts of each case, I attempt to locate these texts amidst the broadest but most essential critical terrain: they each negotiate a dialogical relationship between culture and nature. By setting the stage for examining the human and its relation to the non-human other, the parks have become key sites for displaying the recreation of nature. After my introduction I discuss John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra, focusing on an episode where Muir risks his life for a view from Yosemite Falls. I also consider Muir's failure to empathize with Native Americans he encountered. In my next chapter I analyze John Wesley Powell's Exploration by focusing on his attempt to assert authority over a region by prioritizing the scientific tone in his writing. Next I synthesize historical and contemporary sources, discussing Mary Colter's Grand Canyon architecture alongside the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass-bottom walkway on the Hualapai Indian reservation. In the following chapter I compare the acrophobia-inducing photographs of George Fiske and Emery Kolb. Finally, I discuss transit real and imagined in Grand Canyon and Yosemite, considering the utopian potential of national parks. I close by revisiting questions about our changing environmental discourse and about the future of ecocriticism.