This thesis evaluates and re-evaluates the relationship between the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis through a detailed examination of their published works, and attempts to locate this relationship in the context of the central moral uncertainties of post-1945 British fiction. Most previous critical studies of these authors have tended to discuss the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis in terms of an opposition between the father's realism and the son's postmodernism, and have debated Philip Larkin's influence upon Martin Amis only tangentially. Against this trend, this thesis argues that these three authors share a commitment to literature as a public, moral act, and, in particular, that their works share the intention of articulating a number of closely related secular 'human values' which map out a potential post-Christian morality in British society. The thesis also examines a common tension within their oeuvres inimical to such hopes - the fear that the possibilities of rational self-scrutiny and of becoming 'less deceived' have been discredited by the history of the twentieth century, and that this history instead evidences the dominance of irrational and self-destructive tendencies in the human. These fears, it is further claimed, are implicated in the works of all three authors in a tendency towards the construction of Edenic myths, deterministic simplifications, and despairing devaluations of the value of human life. Overall, this thesis makes the case for the significance of the common concerns of Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin's works in the context of contemporary literary studies: their efforts to create in art an unpretentiously 'public space' for the address of burning moral and existential issues, and their unresolved struggles with the question of what it might mean to live a good life in a society which no longer possesses religion as a common moral language.

This study incorporates archival and historical research on women poets and editors and their roles in the production of modernist and/or leftist little-magazine cultures in Canada. Where the first three chapters investigate women poets who were also magazine editors and/or members of magazine groups, the fourth chapter takes account of women magazine editors who were not themselves poets. Within this framework, the dissertation relates women's editorial work and poetry to a series of crises and transitions in Canada's leftist and modernist little-magazine cultures between 1926 and 1956. This historical pattern of crisis and transition pertains at once to the poetry of Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, P. K. Page, and Miriam Waddington and to the little-magazine groups in which they and other women were active as editors and/or contributing members. Chapter 1 deals with Livesay's editorial activities and poetry in the context of two magazines of the cultural left, Masses and New Frontier, between 1932 and 1937. Chapter 2 concerns Livesay, Marriott, their involvement in poetry groups in Victoria and Vancouver, and their publications in Contemporary Verse and Canadian Poetry Magazine, between 1935 and 1956. Chapter 3 addresses the poetry of Page and Waddington published in Preview and First Statement from 1942 to 1945, their poetry appearing in Contemporary Verse from 1941 to 1952--53, and their editorial activities in and/or relationships to these Montreal and Victoria - Vancouver magazine groups between 1941 and 1956. Chapter 4 documents the histories of some often forgotten women who edited modernist or leftist little magazines in Canada between 1926 and 1956. These core chapters are prefaced and concluded by histories of the antecedents to and descendants of Canadian modernist and leftist magazine cultures.

Thesis (Doctoral)--Université Paris X Nanterre, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Auburn University, 2008. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-40).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Abstract also in English. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-319).

Thesis (Doctoral)--Université Paris X Nanterre, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Université de Paris IV, 1978. / Vol. 4 in Spanish, with critical material in French. "Atelier national de reproduction des thèses, Université de Lille III." Vol. 4 issued as 4 in Etudes hispaniques. Includes indexes. Table of contents for v. 1-3 inserted in v. 4. Includes bibliographical references (v. 3, p. 1289-1345).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 357-367 ).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2009. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on August 10, 2009). A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Comparative Literature. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (PH.D.)--Michigan State University. Rhetoric and Writing, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Aug. 11, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 373-382). Also issued in print.