This thesis discusses the view which Thomas Wolfe had of womankind. Primarily, this view is discerned and evaluated from Wolfe's fiction.

This paper is devoted to a study of the opinions, criticisms, and praises made by Thomas Wolfe on his America as found in his four main novels.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis discusses the effects, primarily on a person’s identity, caused by rural to urban migration during the 1920s and 1930s through investigating the migrations of four literary characters—Quentin Compson, George Webber, Jefferson Abbott, and Prudence Bly—developed by three American Modernist—William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Dawn Powell. I first explore the population trends and movements of Americans out of rural areas to urban ones. In doing so, various sociological theories and historical events are referenced in order to better provide evidence for the reasons for this type of migration, and more importantly, in concern with this study, to illustrate common effects due to rural to urban migration that are explored in depth in subsequent chapters through the examination of the aforementioned characters. Even though the migration of people out of rural areas for more urban centers has occurred ever since the division of those two communities, the interwar years in American society is a key period to consider because of the great social and economic changes that occurred during those two decades. Additionally, it is in this era that we first see clear signs that the United States was transitioning to an urban dominated society. Each of the four characters focused on in this work undergo a rural to urban migration during their young adult years. Because each character experiences this migration in a different way, the severity of the effects of his or her migration changes too. Three of the four characters—Quentin, George, and Prudence—must cope with an identity crisis that is brought to the forefront by their rural to urban migration. Quentin experiences feelings of guilt over his opportunities versus that of his brothers. More importantly, he is unable to rectify the conflict between his perceived identity and the identity placed upon him by the urban community to which he migrates, thus influencing his suicide. George is unable to see the extreme influence that the nostalgic view of his hometown has on the way he perceives the rest of the world. Therefore, he is also unable to recognize the power of time and the inevitability of change. Each time he is forced to see the falseness of his nostalgia, a crucial portion of his identity is dismantled, throwing him into a deep depression. Prudence—due to the arrival of Jefferson, a hometown sweetheart—is forced to reconcile the rural identity she has tried for a decade to forget and the urban one she spent a decade creating. Only at the end of the novel, does she realize that her identity is actually a compilation of both her rural and urban parts. The fourth character—Jefferson Abbott—is relatively unaffected by his migration, in large part due to the stability and confidence he has in his own identity.

Thomas Wolfe's literary output includes four long novels and a vast number of short stories and poems. In addition to this he left a great deal of manuscript which is still in the process of being examined and assorted. His four long novels have drawn the greatest attention, for it is in these that he has done his finest and most provocative work. In each one Wolfe is the central figure, and through his eyes we are allowed to see the world as he saw it. It is because of this that the charges of egotism, paranoia tendencies, genius, immaturity, and plain mediocrity have been hurled at him. From the statement of Sinclair Lewis that Wolfe might live to be the greatest writer that America has yet produced, to Canby's "I think that this novel Of Time and the Riverlike many fiery and ambitious American books ... is an artistic flop," Wolfe has been analyzed and interpreted by critics, near critics, and uncritical sentiment. The most consistent criticism leveled at him is that whatever success he may have attained is due to autobiographical memory, and that if he laid aside the tools of subjectivity, his work would have only an ordinary prosaic quality. It is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that Wolfe's accomplishments were due not to autobiographical memory but instead to a supreme intensity of poetic feeling and tremendous scope of power and imagery--to show that Thomas Wolfe was an artist who was abundantly rich in word range, a master of characterization and of creative imagination, thereby to refute the claim of those who narrow his potentialities merely to those of an autobiographical nature.

No se posee.

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In this study, I analyze the significance of Shakespearean intertextuality in the major works of Thomas Wolfe featuring protagonist Eugene Gant: Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. Specifically, I explore Gant's habits and preferences as a reader by examining the narrative arising from the protagonist's perspectives of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear. I examine the significance of parallel reading habits of Wolfe the author and Gant the character. I also scrutinize the plurality of Gant's methods of cognition as a reader who interprets texts, communicates his connections with texts, and wars with texts. Further, I assess the cumulative effect of Wolfe's having blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, between the novel and drama. I assert, then, that Wolfe, by incorporating a Shakespearean intertext, reveals aspects indicative of postmodernism.