Edward Albee is influenced by the Absurd Drama of Samuel Beckett whose works involve existential concerns. Albee follows Beckett&rsquo / s traces in the dramatization of uncertainty, alienation and the question of freedom. Albee&rsquo / s characters do not have fixed identities, and they suffer from their identity problems. The notion of Other enhances this uncertainty. The ambiguity of existence, whether they really are or not, presents another problem for these characters. Their lives are based on illusions, and the line between the reality and fantasy is absent. Alienation of the human being from the self and the others is another existential theme that Albee deals with. Alienation is partly caused by lack of communication, and as a result, the isolated self is entrapped in his own condition. Freedom becomes a confusing question in his works as it makes the characters anxious while choosing one option among various others on his own, and as it renders the characters responsible for their free choices. So, the characters tend to be passive agents in life, which is in fact another choice. Albee extends Beckett&rsquo / s absurdist ideas and adopts the Absurd Drama to highlight his social concerns as he is also a social critic. The targets of his criticism are materialism, loss of values and broken human relationships. The playwright challenges the audience for a reform on these points.

This thesis analyses the women characters in four novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley, The Mill on the Floss and Sons and Lovers. The first chapter gives information on the historical background of the Victorian period and early 20th century in England in which the novels were written, on the biography of the authors of the novels and clarifies the aim and methodology of the study. The following chapters analyse the women charaters - Helen Huntingdon, Shirley Keeldar, Maggie Tulliver and Clara Dawes - selected for study according to how far they went against social norms, perceptions about women and society&#039 / s morals, and provide a general evaluation of each character. The conclusion presents a comparison of the four women characters&#039 / attitudes, and asserts that each of them display a controversial attitude in at least one of these areas, considering the period in which the novels were written.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse David Lodge&rsquo / s campus novels Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975) and Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) to see how nihilism is dealt with in the modern academic world by the main characters in the novels. The characters will be examined in the light of Friedrich Nietzsche&rsquo / s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-85). As the prophet Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the mouthpiece of Nietzsche himself, this thesis aims at studying Lodge&rsquo / s novels in the light of Nietzsche&rsquo / s ideas. In this respect, this thesis provides a closer look into Zarathustrian (Nietzschean) concepts of &ldquo / will to power&rdquo / , &ldquo / eternal recurrence&rdquo / and &ldquo / overman&rdquo / , and it reveals to what extent Lodge&rsquo / s main characters can achieve a full &ldquo / will to power&rdquo / , attain a joyful acceptance of &ldquo / eternal recurrence&rdquo / , and overcome themselves on the way to becoming &ldquo / overman&rdquo / . With the elaboration of these three concepts, this thesis aims to uncover the ways in which Lodge&rsquo / s main characters recover from the negative effects of futility and depression caused by nihilism in the modern world.

The thesis reveals the main principles of the theatrical chronotope and examines the ways in which it is embodied in the novels of two postmodern authors &ndash / The Magus by John Fowles and England, England by Julian Barnes. These are analyzed as presenting two different variants of texts that employ the theatrical chronotope to exploit its different possible semantic implications. The thesis argues that in The Magus theatricality is employed to convey the author&rsquo / s philosophical and aesthetical thoughts. The main qualities of the theatrical universe, actualized in the novel, are its epistemological potential determining the protagonist&rsquo / s quest in the &ldquo / heuristic mill&rdquo / of the metatheatre, and the multileveled structure of theatrical reality, combining different degrees of conventionality, which serves to posit the question of the relationships of aesthetical and actual reality. In England, England, theatricality is used to investigate the nature of modern society presented as a kind of totalitazing spectacle. Accordingly, the theatrical chronotope is used to construct a simulative reality, manifesting that of the modern society in replacing the actual reality and experience of living with the illusory pseudo-experience of consuming the images of reality and living, in its role-imposing and transforming abilities manipulating both personal and national identity.

Against the background of The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, this study explores the ways Hanif Kureishi problematizes the notion of identity. The present study aims to lay bare how Kureishi moves the previously fixed categories into a slippery ground in his fiction and, in the process, how he challenges the fundamental givens of identity politics against the background of Homi Bhabha&rsquo / s key concepts: hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, agency, liminality and the third space. It will also make references to the category of nation as narration in relation to Thatcherite politics and identity as a performative act/process. Bhabha&rsquo / s theories will also help highlight how Kureishi&rsquo / s characters create their liminal spaces and how they perform their identity within these spaces. Looking at both novels, it is concluded that the nature of identity is fluid since it is configured according to many variables such as religious practice, political activism, arts and sexual discourse which are not stable, either. Kureishi&rsquo / s novels fictionalize that identity can never be reified by the essentialist pre-givens of the traditional ideologies. In a multicultural world, rather than assimilation, it is important to grasp the unstable nature of identity in order to respect cultural differences. Thus, in a world where the dominant voices do not/cannot suppress the marginal ones, identity, national or individual, will keep on transforming itself.

This thesis analyses Edmund Spenser&rsquo / s Fowre Hymnes in light of the holistic Renaissance world view and poet&rsquo / s collection of various tradition of ideas. Spenser&rsquo / s treatment of love is explored as the cosmic principle of harmony. Universal order is examined with an emphasis on the position of man in the ontological hierarchy. Thus, this thesis investigates Spenser&rsquo / s own suggestions to imitate macrocosmic harmony and order in the microcosmic level.

This thesis aims to investigate the question of reality in Tom Stoppard&rsquo / s plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, and Travesties. Each of these plays closely examines the nature of reality and certainty and shows Stoppard as the critique of grand narratives of Reality, Truth, and Art. By deconstructing these master narratives, Stoppard attempts to invalidate the convictions that reality is fixed and that art should faithfully reproduce the material world in which reality is perceived as permanent. His challenge creates a realization in the audience and makes them question the issues they previously took for granted. To divest the audience of certainty and to display the endless pursuit of reality both in life and in art, Stoppard, in his plays, makes use of some metadramatic devices. Stoppard&rsquo / s distinctive use of the metadramatic devices which reveal the unaccountable nature of reality and the limits of knowledge is the core of this study

This study is about British postwar fiction and its canonical reception according to a special categorisation of the novelists who were publishing in Britain during the two decades after the end of the Second World War. The study emphasises that mainstream literary criticism of 1950s and &rsquo / 60s Britain tended to catalogue the novelists of this period according to a well-established dichotomy between tradition and innovation in which the traditional realist novels, the neorealist works of C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, were privileged over any other fictional work having modernist innovative characteristics. Therefore, the first published novels of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles, novelists belonging to today&rsquo / s postmodern canon, were first critically recognised as social realist works in Britain. One of the objects of this study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of this classification. Moreover, the main argument of the study is that none of these three novelists should have been classified as a traditional realist novelist. All of these three British postwar novelists were reconceptualising traditional realism by self-reflexively including the problem of representation as part of their conventional subject matters in their formal realist novels.

This study intends to analyse the terms camp and closet in Alan Hollinghurst&rsquo / s fiction, since all four of his novels - The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1993), The Spell (1998), and The Line of Beauty (2004) - investigate the gay male experience throughout the late-twentieth century The point in analysing these terms in Hollinghurst&rsquo / s work is to find out whether the author writes from the margin or in the centre to recreate the origin. Gay subjectivities are of great concern to this study, yet it does not mean that it will be a product of identity politics. Identity politics does regard gender, race, or ethnicities, which are nothing but social constructions, as fixed or biologically determined traits. Thus, identity politics, while trying to recentre the decentred and marginalised identities, re-establishes the binary structure of the Western thought. This study analyses how Hollinghurst, by camping and closeting the gay male, re-produces homosexuality as a distinct identity with a subculture of its own.

This thesis is a comparative study of how Shakespeare&rsquo / s ideas transcend the boundaries of his own time and still remain as the major sources of inspiration for modern dramatists. Arnold Wesker and Eug&eacute / ne Ionesco explore the concept of the &quot / other&quot / leading to loss of identity and awareness of non-being embedded in Shakespeare&rsquo / s works. The main argument is that the contemporary playwrights reinterpret Shakespeare&rsquo / s works in the light of some modern issues and ideas to reveal the entrapment of the individual.