Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, 2005. / System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-246).

This dissertation examines William Plomer's first novel, Turbott Wolfe (1925), within its socio-political and literary context, and also explores the crucial relationship between the author's life and his work. Turbott Wolfe at one level represents Plomer's complex responses to and interpretation of the South African milieu during the early 1920s. During this decade, the foundations of modem Apartheid were being consolidated, and African Nationalism emerged as a powerful challenge to the South African state. Turbott Wolfe is informed by these political developments, and the milieu and events portrayed in the novel vividly express the author's feelings about and attitudes towards the society he finds himself in. Since its publication, ZiZ&stsJBal&a has suffered considerable critical neglect The superficiality of much of the existing criticism about the novel must be challenged, since Turbott Wolfe is not only of tremendous intrinsic literary merit, but also provides valuable insights into the socio-political environment and historical moment in which Plotter wrote. Thus one of the novel's main concerns is the all informing "colour question", which dominated political debate in the 1920s. Plomer's appr< -• "colour question" is unorthodox,« rajor question confronting the reader is how this unusual novel cane to be written. An examination of earlier fiction reveals that Turbott Wolfe is both influenced b; and a reaction against existing literary traditions, while the major themes show in what way and to what extent the novel is engaged with contemporary sociopolitical issues. The key to this crucial question, however, lies in a detailed exploration of the author's personal history. Turbott Wolfe emerges as an important work within the development of South African literature, a novel which encapsulates some of the complexity and diversity of contemporary South Africa, as perceived by its youthful author.

Although the most well-known collaborations of William Plomer and Benjamin Britten are the three church parables (or church operas) - Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace, and The Prodigal Son - by the time of the completion of Curlew River in 1964, the librettist and composer had been working together for well over a decade. During that time, they had completed the opera Gloriana and had considered collaborating on three other projects: one a children's opera on Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mr. Tod, one on an original story of Plomer's called "Tyco the Vegan," and one on a Greek myth (possibly Arion, Daedalus and Icarus, or Phaëthon). Far from being footnotes to the parables, these early collaborations established Plomer and Britten's working relationship and brought to light their common interests as well as their independent ones. Their successive early collaborations, therefore, can be thought of as a conversation through creative expression. This metaphor of conversation can be applied both to successive collaborations and to the completed Gloriana, in that the libretto and the music can be seen as representing different interpretations of both major and minor characters in the opera, including Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. In Gloriana, Britten employed at least three specifically musical methods of challenging the meaning of the libretto: instrumental commentary, textural density, and dramatically significant referential pitches. Plomer and Britten's conversation, carried out through these early collaborations, touches on the function of art, activism, and modern morality, but it is best circumscribed by the concept of myth. Two divergent and very influential interpretations of myth - Matthew Arnold's "sweetness and light" and primal liberation (deduced from Nietzsche) - can be usefully applied to Plomer and Britten's unfolding conversation. The implications of Plomer and Britten's adoption of myth as the topic and language of their collaborative conversation are vast and must be considered in order to understand more fully their work together.

This thesis essays a comparative study of William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe (1925) and Sol Plaatje's Mhudi (1930). Although writing from very different subject positions within the social order of the time, Plomer and Plaatje embody in their novels a strikingly similar vision of a South Africa free of racial barriers. Plaatje's version of South African history in Mhudi deconstructs colonial binarism by dramatizing not only conflict and difference but also co-operation and commonality. Holding the past up as a mirror to the present, it protests against racial injustice while implying the continuing possibility of reconciliation. Plomer reacts angrily to white hypocrisy and insists on the rights and humanity of his African characters, in the name of imperatives both moral and political. He seeks additional sanction for these by situating the South African race questioning the context of a Western world slowly awakening to the consequences of modernity. During a time of political turbulence, both writers speak out boldly and confidently against the rising dominance of segregationist ideology. The imminent inception of full democracy in South Africa has reanimated the relevance of these writers' vision of a non- racial social order. If one of the challenges facing the South African literary historian 'today is the reconstruction of a truly national literary tradition, then Mhudi and Turbott Wolfe would appear to be key works in such an enterprise. As different as Plaatje's epic myth-making is from Plomer's modernist irony, both novels contrive to speak with a new voice: a national voice which expresses the aspirations of all South Africa's people. They are, moreover, novels whose survival seems guaranteed as much by their aesthetic qualities as by their ideological orientation. The novels are examined against the backgrounds of South African society and colonial literary production. They are seen as milestones in the development of a liberal South African literary tradition. By breaking with the dominant oppositional mode, whether that of "white writing" or an emergent "writing black", Plomer and Plaatje exemplify a literature at once socially relevant and possessed of a prophetic vision that remains of significance in South Africa today.