The purpose of this thesis is to explore in depth the effect which World War I had on the life and early poetry of Robert Graves, primarily by tracing his involvement in the war as revealed directly in his autobiography and by examining his responses to that involvement as revealed indirectly in the two volumes of poetry which he wrote during the war.

The main interest of this master's thesis are novels by Robert Graves I, Claudius and Claudius the God and an adaptation of the novels in a TV series I, Claudius produced by BBC in 1976. At the beginning of this master's thesis are described lives of the ancient authors (Suetonius, Tacitus, Velleius Paterculus, Cassius Dio and Josephus Flavius) and their works. At the beginning are also described princeps (emperors) of the Roman Empire, who ruled during the time period of the plot (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and of course Claudius). This part is based on the modern researches. The master's thesis compares the novels to ancient historic sources (Suetonius, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Josephus Flavius et al.), that Robert Graves used during the writing of his novels. That's why there are many similarities between Graves' novels and ancient sources. Robert Graves took point of view of ancient authors. It means that in the novels are their opinions and theories. For example, Tiberius in the novel is a negative person, because Tacitus and Cassius Dio thought bad of him. The second interest of this master's thesis is to describe use of a film in the education. There is a scheme of a lesson in that could be I, Claudius used. Keywords Claudius, Fiction, Film, Robert Graves, Didactics

The Great War narrative has been the subject of wide scholarship but there have been no studies that have specifically focused on understanding the ethical and aesthetic struggles of the artist in war, the artist’s dilemma. The generation that experienced the Great War included many giants of twentieth-century intellectual, cultural, and political life, many of whom wrote personal narratives of their experiences. These narratives have contributed to shaping familial stories and the meta-narratives of nation states for generations—sometimes limiting a fuller understanding of the war. Through this thesis I aim to open the field of narrative investigation into a wider inquiry through applying what Brian Lande identifies as the ‘sensual and moral conversion’ of the soldier in war, to the artistic actor in the theatre of war. The proposition is to identify and read beyond generic conventions, then to observe the process, the tasks, and the moral, psychosocial, and aesthetic dilemmas of the artist in the theatre of war. To do this, the work focuses on three robust texts of the Great War: Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929), Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937). The project explores not only the nuance of creative witness, self-witness, and testimony, but proposes a fuller empathic engagement with the narrative within the social contract of war writing. After developing a model of the formal conventions which structure the genre of war writing, and building on the work of Max Saunders, Henri LeFebvre, and others, I have carried out close readings of the three authors’ Great War narratives and related works. With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses literary, artistic, historical, ethical, and sociological studies, and with extensive archival research, I propose to introduce another perspective on reading between the lines of Great War narratives. This perspective encompasses the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas that faced the artists of the war generation as they acted and reacted to war, a generation that shaped the intellectual, political, scientific, and artistic life of the twentieth century, and the lives of generations to follow.

This thesis explores the origin and expression of dialectical thought in the life and writings of the American modernist Laura Riding. Within a biographical framework, I trace the steps by which it became the defining characteristic of her poetic, literary and critical works. A few have noted Riding's dialectical manner; none have appreciated its centrality. This is the first detailed study. An introductory outline of the origin and definition of dialectic provides a working theoretical context for the study that follows. Riding was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City, 1901. Her father, a Jewish émigré, was a committed activist for the left and included Riding in his campaigning at a very young age, immersing and educating her in the political and philosophical radicalism thriving in New York's Jewish communities of the era. There she internalised the revolutionary dialectics that would inform her aesthetic practice. Breaking with her father in her teens, she abandoned politics for literature. As Laura Riding - the name she adopted in 1927 and with which her literary writings continue to be associated - she moved to London and began collaborating with Robert Graves, relocating with him to Majorca in 1929. Producing poetry, fiction, criticism and experimental philosophico-literary works, she became a formidable presence within European literary modernism. Many aspects of her work are dialectical. Paradox, inversion and negation are perennial textual features. Key events in her life were also experienced as dialectical. Her insistence upon 'death' as an inverted sigil of unmediated vitality points toward a negatively dialectical mode of thought. In this regard, the theories of Theodor W. Adorno prove invaluable. Adorno provides a unique lexicon of terms - 'constitutive subjectivity', 'administered world', 'true object' - with which to draw out Riding's dialectical subtleties. Reading them alongside Adorno's negatively dialectical theory of modernist art and aesthetic praxis, certain aspects of Riding's writings are illuminated and, in some respects, they correspond. After a suicide attempt in 1929, Riding's perspective changed. Before it, her point of view was positioned within institutionally determined 'reality', and 'truth' beyond it was adumbrated by dialectical means. Afterwards, she believed herself transfigured: the embodiment of immediate, consciously apprehended noumenal objectivity. But the written word remained recalcitrant toward her attempts to inscribe this newfound positive 'truth'. This frustration contributed to her abandonment of poetry at the end of the 1930s. Re-emerging in the 1960s as Laura (Riding) Jackson, her disavowal of poetry and exploration of 'truth-potential' in language utilised dialectical approaches derived from her earlier experiences and writings.

The year 2014 will mark the centennial of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. This historic anniversary will likely provoke several discussions from all fields in the humanities concerning the Great War's significance on contemporary culture through history, visual art, and in the case of this essay: literature. In light of this event, any serious discussion among scholars should undeniably begin with how the war continues to be represented today through a thorough, contemporary analysis of its many key literary texts. This essay will examine, in this regard, how past and contemporary discourses in literary theory-primarily concerned with how an individual combatant subject attempts to construct and understand their own traumatic experiences through poetic and literary discourse-can continue to incite discussion on why literature of the Great War and its influential role in defining how it has come to be understood in our cultural memory remains relevant even today. Under the guiding influence of Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory, I will discuss how three important works-a poetry collection, a memoir, and a modern work of historical fiction-all contribute to how the war has become represented as a tragic rupture in history that reversed the idea of human progress and left an entire generation disillusioned in its aftermath, regardless of the historical veracity of this legacy. The texts I will be examining include: select poems of Wilfred Owen, Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, and Regeneration by Pat Barker. In addition to this, I will conclude with an analysis of how a contemporary reading of these texts can contribute to a larger discussion of the crisis of historicity in our current post-modern cultural landscape.

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