In my dissertation, "Narrative Representations (of Time) in the 20th Century Novel" I examine the way in which depictions of time intersect with narrative representation in the modern and postmodern novel. I specifically focus on the use of parentheses as a way to capture differing types of chronology in narrative. The parenthesis, in a purely visual sense, physically disrupts the act of reading by creating a type of barrier around one text, separating it from the main narrative. I argue that it is with this disruption that 20th century authors were able to experiment with depictions of time and the disruption of linear narrative. Borrowing Gerard Genette's phrase "temporal ellipses" I examine how authors in the 20th century used the "temporal parentheses" in order to convey different temporal experiences in narrative. For Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the parenthesis works as a way of presenting simultaneity of experiences when spatially separated. For William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, the parenthesis creates a kind of compressed time, so that the past becomes a heavy burden upon the present, as represented by the way a narrative experience can be extended within parentheses. In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children the parenthesis is used to bridge and create a dialogue between the present moment of the telling and the past moment of the story. In Toni Morrison's Sula, the parenthesis calls attention to physical placement, representing the way in which personal identity is linked to physical place and the rejection of permanence in the novel.

From W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, modernists have frequently attested to the anxiety permeating members of modern civilisation. While critics have treated anxiety as a consequence of the historical circumstances of the modernist period—two World Wars and the disintegration of European empires—my aim is to view anxiety in both a psychoanalytical and political light and investigate modernist anxiety as a narrative ploy that diagnoses the modern condition. Defining modernist anxiety as feelings of fear and alienation that reveal the uncanny relation between self and ideological state apparatuses which themselves suffer from trauma, perversion, and neurosis—I focus on the works of four key modernist writers—Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Gertrude Stein. These authors have repeatedly constructed the mind as an open system, making the psyche one of the sites most vulnerable to the power of colonial ideology but also the modernist space par excellence to narrate the building and falling of empire. While the first part of my dissertation investigates the neurosis of post-war London in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the second part of my thesis discusses the perverse demands of the colonial system in Forster’s A Passage to India and Woolf’s The Waves, arguing that Woolf and Forster extend Freud’s understanding of repetition compulsion by demonstrating that the colonial system derives a “perverse” pleasure from repeating its own impossible demands. The concluding section of my dissertation discusses Woolf and Stein’s queer primitivism as the antidote to anxiety and the transcendence of perversity. My dissertation revives Freud’s role in the modernist project: Freud not only provides avant-garde writers with a theory of consciousness, but his construction of the fragmented psyche—a construction which had come to dominate modernist renditions of internality by the early-twentieth century—functions as a political stratagem for an imperial critique. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-03-11 16:48:57.865

This thesis argues for a revised understanding of time in modernist literature. It challenges the longstanding critical tradition that has used the French philosopher Henri Bergson's distinction between clock-time and durée to explicate time in the modernist novel. To do so, it replaces Stephen Kern's influential understanding of modernity as characterized by the solidification of a homogenous clock-time, with Peter Osborne’s notion of modernity as structured by a competing range of temporalizations of history. The following chapters then read the fictional and historical writings of H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf alongside such a conception of modernity, and show that all these writers explored different versions of historical time. Wells explored geological time in The Time Machine (1895) and An Outline of History (1920), Lawrence adapted Friedrich Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence in Women in Love (1920), Movements in European History (1921) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and Woolf imagined an aeviternal historical continuity and a phenomenological historical time in Between the Acts (1941). By addressing historical time, this thesis enables a reassessment of the politics of modernist time. It challenges the view that the purported modernist exploration of a Bergsonian private time constitutes an asocial and ahistorical retreat from the political. Rather, by transferring Osborne's notion of a 'politics of time' to the literary sphere, this study argues that the competing configurations of politically-charged historical time in literary modernism, form the analogue of the competing versions of such a time within modernity, emblematized by the contrasting accounts of historical time of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.

This thesis investigates the rise of aviation and its influence on modernist literature in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that the emergence of heavier-than-air flight facilitated experimentation and innovation in modernist writing in order to capture the new experience of flight and its impact on the modern world. Previous critical discussions largely focus on militarist and nationalist ideas and beliefs regarding the uses of the aeroplane, and in doing so overlook the diversity of attitudes and approaches towards aviation that had greater influence on modernist thought. Through a historicist reading of a selection of modernist texts, this study extends scholarly debates by linking alternative views of aviation and modernist literary and narrative experimentation. I begin my study by exploring how H.G. Wells's calls for the establishment of a world government (necessitated by the emergence of aviation) led to an increasingly assertive and urgent tone in his later writings. His works serve as a useful starting point to read the more experimental, modernist prose forms that follow in his wake. While Wells's texts were affected on a pragmatic level, those of the modernists were affected in a more imaginative, perceptual, and sensory way, which highlights the deeper extent to which aviation influenced modernist thought. For Virginia Woolf, the all-encompassing aerial view offered a new way of seeing the connections between living things, leading to an expanded narrative scope in her later writings. For William Faulkner, flight as aerial performance and spectacle was a liberating experience and became a metaphor for escape from an increasingly capitalistic and creativity-deprived world. John Dos Passos, in contrast, saw the effects of air travel as harmful to the human senses and perceptions of the world around, leading him to incorporate aspects of flight into his fast-paced, multi-modal narratives in order to convey and critique the disorienting and alienating experience of flight. Collectively, these chapters show that as much as the aeroplane was capable of causing mass destruction, it was also constructive in the way that it enabled these new ways of thinking, and it is this complex and paradoxical nature, this thesis proposes, that makes the aeroplane an important modernist symbol.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are two well-known women writers of the twentieth century who committed suicide. The narratives created by their deaths have in some instances become as important as the canonical work they produced. In an effort to understand their motivations and struggles, critics and the public alike have sometimes reduced these women to victims of the patriarchy, mental illness, or even themselves. Beginning with my own discovery of this issue in the legacies of Plath and Woolf combined with my personal dealings with suicide in my family, I recount how I lost these two women as exemplary figures because of their choice to commit suicide. I then take a look at what others have said about their deaths and how it has affected their legacies as writers. Finally, I take a look at Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Plath’s The Bell Jar for an alternate perspective on suicide. Through this journey, I recount how I have been able to regain my respect for these two talented women by considering multiple viewpoints and acknowledging the nuance inherent in any account.

Between 1880 and 1920, both urban England and essays published in urban England underwent seismic shifts and splits, as population grew, education and technology advanced, and periodical publishing expanded. The city grew both larger in size and smaller in units of comprehensibility, and many of its people were (or were perceived by certain thinkers to be) less free and more instrumental. The periodical essay too grew more common and, at the same time, smaller in size, less free, and more instrumental, as it developed closer ties with journalism, with the industrial city, and with readers of all classes. By an examination of various forms of essaying in the period, this thesis argues that the essay's transitions parallel modernity's transitions, not only because the essay reflects or enacts or follows trends in modernity, but also because modernity at the time was conditioned by the essay's way of thinking through its form and cannot be fully understood without reference to the activities of the urban periodical essay at the time. The essay between 1880 and 1920 was a highly social genre, and this sociability manifested in a number of ways this thesis will explore. Its periodical context allowed it a ritual, patterning relationship with its readers; its brevity and limitations pushed it into dialectical, double-glancing modes of thought that complemented its fragmented setting; its tendency to direct attention away from its own form gave it a unique, constitutive role in literary modernisms; its material connections to new technologies implicated it in new doubts concerning urban modernity, and its massed readership embroiled it in fears over anti- or a-intellectual over-simplification. This thesis tells the stories of the periodical essay, in London, as an actor in modernity's transitions, by examining four concepts central to both the essay and to emergent modernity: play, the trick, doubt, and wisdom. These concepts are treated, primarily, through the work of three writers-Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, and Virginia Woolf-all of whom, in their styling of the essay, embody different moments and essayistic registers in the transitions of modernity and reveal the cross-fertilising relationship between essaying and what is meant by 'the modern'.

This thesis examines the way in which the fictional biographies of Virginia Woolf, Orlando and Flush, prefigure central tenets of postmodern fiction. To demonstrate the postmodern elements present in Orlando and Flush, this thesis focuses on how the fictional biographies exhibit three postmodern characteristics: concern for historiography, extensive use of parody, and the denaturalization of cultural assumptions. Born from Woolf’s desire to revolutionize biography by incorporating elements of fiction alongside historical fact, these two novels parallel later works of historiographic metafiction in several key respects. Woolf’s extensive use of parody in Orlando and Flush prefigures how postmodern parody foregrounds the many ways in which all narratives are inherently constructions. Woolf also expresses a postmodern attitude by denaturalizing cultural assumptions about sexual difference and social class. When taken together, these three traits reveal how Orlando and Flush possess an ontological philosophy indicative of postmodern literature.

Children in modernist literature have been largely ignored in critical study; an odd oversight, since children in Victorian and contemporary literature have been sources of rich material for literary critics. In novels published from 1930 until 1934, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Evelyn Waugh address the relationships between children/childhood and nostalgia in The Apes of God (Lewis), The Waves (Woolf), and A Handful of Dust (Waugh). Their complicated and often conflicting depictions of childhood and desire for the past reveal children's overlooked importance in British modernism, as well as a lack of singularity in the manifestations of children and nostalgia that is crucial to contemporary understandings of both terms.

Anders Öhman argumenterar för att i litteraturundervisningen använda sig av en metod han väljer att kalla ”skugga intrigen”. Denna studies syfte har varit att försöka konkretisera hans analysmetod och att undersöka om den kan användas på texter som saknar en tydlig intrigstruktur. En analys av Öhmans bok har gjorts för att få fram ett tydligt tillvägagångssätt för analysen, vilket därefter har applicerats på Virginia Woolfs roman Mrs Dalloway. Analysen visade att en intrigskuggning av romanen var en besvärlig men ändock givande metod. Trots svårigheterna kring valet av viktiga tematikstödjande händelser blev intrigskuggningen en god lässtrategi för inlevelseläsningen. Störst möjligheter har metoden att genomföras muntligt i ett flerstämmigt klassrum samt som hjälpmedel och lässtrategi vid arbetet med svårare texter.