Texte remanié de: Th.--English literature--New Haven--Yale university, 1964. / Bibliogr. p. 119-121. Index.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2007. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Terry Pratchett, author of the best-selling Discworld series, and winner of multiple literary awards, writes satirical fantasy for adults and children. The academic community has been slow to accept Pratchett's work as worthy of notice. Factors that contribute to this reticence include writing fantasy, writing for children, a high volume of work, and popularity in general society. This thesis will provide a comparison between Pratchett's work and that of Evelyn Waugh by focusing on their academic satire, shedding new light on Pratchett's work from a literary perspective, thus lending greater value to his Discworld series as a collection of novels with measurable literary value to the academic community.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2008. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

This dissertation corrects the notion that fiction written in the late 1920s through the early 1940s fails to achieve the mastery and innovation of high modernism. It posits late modernism as a literary dispensation that instead pushes beyond high modernism's narrative innovations in order to fully express individuals' lived experience in the era between world wars. This dissertation claims novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett, as exemplars of a late modernism characterized by invocation and redeployment of conventionalized narrative forms in service of fresh explorations of the dislocation, inauthenticity, and alienation that characterize this era. By deforming and repurposing formal conventions, these writers construct entirely new forms whose disfigured likenesses to the genres they manipulate reveals a critical orientation to the canon. These writers' reconfigurations of forms--including the bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, and autobiography--furthermore reveal the extent to which such conventionalized genres coerce and prescribe a unified and autonomous subjectivity. By dismantling these genres from within, Bowen, Waugh, and Beckett reveal their mechanics to be instrumental in coercing into being a notion of the subject that is both limiting and delimited. These authors also invoke popular forms--including the Gothic aesthetic, imperial adventure narrative, and detective fiction--to reveal that non-canonical texts, too, participate in the process by which narrative inevitably posits consciousness as its premise. I draw upon Tyrus Miller's conception of late modernism to explicate how these authors' various engagements with established forms simultaneously perform immanent critique and narrative innovation. This dissertation also endorses David Lloyd's assertion that canonical narrative forms are instrumental in producing subjectivity within text and thereby act as a coercive exemplar for readers. I invoke several critics' engagements with conventional genres' narrative mechanics to explicate this process. By examining closely the admixture of narrative forms that churns beneath the surfaces of these texts, I aim to pinpoint how the deformation of conventionalized forms can yield a fresh and distinctly late modernist vision of selfhood.

Thesis (S.B. in Literature)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-66). / Introduction: Last Fall semester I had only a very vague idea of a thesis topic: with a broad interest in the conflict between romantic love and religion inspired in part by a summertime reading of Brideshead Revisited, I spent a few evenings sharing company with St. Augustine, Abelard and Eloise, and Julian of Norwich. My interest in serious religion was quickly satisfied. Soon after choosing to focus on twentieth century British Catholic novelists-Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh-I realized the extent to which my enjoyment of Waugh greatly surpassed that of all my other readings. Jabe, I told myself, if you are going to spend a year of your precious young time on a literature thesis, you had damn well better have fun. Evelyn Waugh it was. His work is often noted for its contradictory nature. A devout Catholic, he was also somewhat of a misanthrope; across and within works he mixes bitter, hilarious satire with authentic, often quiet, human concern to a powerful effect that proves remarkably difficult to analyze. The distant narrator of many of his works and the romantic narrator of others both seem at odds with the public Waugh, a crotchety, outspoken conservative to whom critics often refer. Thus it was somewhat with the interest of finding a "new voice" in Waugh that I began my project. I did not find the voice I expected, but eight months, countless hours of reading and discussion, and many drafts later, my interest in the complex workings of Waugh's work has only deepened, surely the sign of a successful topic choice. While there have been numerous biographies of Evelyn Waugh in recent years, with another due to be published in several months, there has been a notable dearth of full-length, or indeed even article-length, critical texts on Waugh's work. This phenomenon can perhaps be explained in part by the seemingly autobiographical nature of his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited, which was adapted in 1981 into an enduringly popular BBC miniseries and in 2008 into a full-length feature film. However, it is not only the popular imagination that seems to be captivated by Waugh's life; numerous critics of Waugh attempt to understand his work through the lens of his biography, using details such as his conversion to Catholicism early in his career or his political writings and public statements to inform their readings of his novels. The themes and qualities of Waugh's novels are not easily unified across his career; the cynical work of his early career seem very much at odds with the sentimentality and overtly religious concerns of much of his later writings, of which Brideshead Revisited is the best-known example. Accordingly, Waugh's career is often divided into two sections. The first section begins in 1928 with the publication of his first novel Decline and Fall and ends before the publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1945, while the second section begins with Brideshead Revisited and continues to the end of Waugh's career, encompassing the historico-religious novel Helena and the Catholic war novels of the Sword of Honour trilogy. Attempts at reconciling these "two Waughs" recur throughout the criticism; many studies of Waugh as an author either read the later novels as representing Waugh's "true concerns" and attempt to fit the early satires into this model, or dispense altogether with trying to unify the concerns of Waugh's early and later works. According to James Carens, "in Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh turned from the nihilistic rejection of his early satires to an affirmative commitment; to satisfy the other impulse of the artist-rebel, as Albert Camus has described him, Waugh affirmed a vision which he believed gave unity to life." According to Frederick L. Beaty's reading of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh's "affirmative commitment" is a belief in God and Catholicism: The chaos that surrounds [Waugh] becomes not only tolerable but meaningful as he views from a radically changed perspective a universe he once saw in ironic terms. Relativism, paradox, and indeterminacy give way before the conviction that an immanent, transcendent Deity is the ultimate reality. Waugh's enunciation of this positive credo marks a conscious turning away from philosophical irony-with its essentially skeptical vision-as the underlying world view for his fiction. The conclusion of Brideshead Revisited thus functions as an articulation of Waugh's religious beliefs and a rejection of his earlier secular works; Beaty secures meaning in Waugh's writing by aligning each novel with Waugh's presumed personal philosophy. In contrast, non-biographical criticism of Waugh often fails to find consistent themes or concerns across the novels. Michael Gorra articulates this phenomenon well in the following argument, which begins with criticism of to Jeffrey Heath's The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing: Like most of the explicitly Catholic criticism of Waugh, [Heath's book] places too much weight upon his comic prefigurations of his later beliefs. Most treatments of Waugh as a satirist tend, similarly, to read his career backwards.. .A useful corrective to accounts of Waugh as either Catholic apologist or satirist is David Lodge's argument in Evelyn Waugh that his early novels in particular contain "a mosaic of local comic and satiric effects rather than a consistent message." In this paper, I propose a different reading of Waugh: one that finds neither dogmatic affirmation nor disparate ingenious effects but finds rather the performance of a complex expression of the insecurity and energy of the modern world that disintegrates the traditional interpretation of Waugh's work as strict ironic satire. / S.B.in Literature

La construction des personnages et de représentations du pouvoir, ainsi que la mise en place d’une écriture métafictionnelle dans sept romans mexicains publiés dans les années 90 sont les thèmes centraux de cette étude. Pour notre analyse de El disparo de argón, Huatulqueños, La lotería de San Jorge, Una de dos, Salón de belleza, Un asesino solitario et En busca de Klingsor, nous nous sommes inspiré des théories de Roland Barthes et de Philippe Hamon concernant l’étude sémiologique des personnages, ainsi que des modes de représentation narrative décrits par Gérard Genette. Nous sommes également parti des idées ce même auteur sur l’écriture métafictionnelle, ainsi que des travaux de Linda Hutcheon et de Patricia Waugh sur la question. Notre analyse montre que narrateurs, personnages et décors sont construits à l’aide de figures telles que l’hyperbole ou la comparaison. Le paysage peut agir comme un personnage de plus, et engendrer des espaces métaphysiques reflétant l’histoire. Pour ce qui est du rapport au pouvoir, l’on distinguera deux types de personnages : des êtres vulnérables, d’une part, possédant le pouvoir de manière éphémère ; et des puissances invisibles et inhumaines, de l’autre, surveillant et régissant les destinées des personnages. Tandis que les premiers partagent des caractéristiques physiques et des comportements plus ou moins similaires, les puissances invisibles correspondent à des figures telles que le Destin, le Hasard, Dieu ou encore le Diable. Les représentations du pouvoir remplissent toutes une même série de fonctions. Chacun des sept romans envisagés par cette étude déploie des moyens visant à souligner la nature réflexive de l’écriture chez le narrateur. L’analyse des mises en abyme, des métalepses et de la transtextualité au sein du récit permet de mettre au jour et d’évaluer de manière systématique la présence effective de la métafiction. / This essay presents an analysis of the construction of characters, the representations of power and the development of metafictional writing through a discussion of seven Mexican novels published in the nineties. The essay utilizes the theoretical advances of Roland Barthes and Philippe Hamon in regards to semiological analysis of characters and Gérard Genette’s modes of narrative representation to analyze El disparo de argón, Huatulqueños, La lotería de San Jorge, Una de dos, Salón de belleza, Un asesino solitario y En busca de Klingsor. Metafictional writing was looked at using the theoretical lens of not only Genette, but also Linda Hutcheon and Patricia Waugh. In conclusion, narrators, characters and setting are constructed by means of techniques like hyperbole or comparison. In addition, landscape comes to function as another character in the story, creating a metaphysical space that reflects history. When speaking of power, there are two identifiable types of characters: vulnerable creatures with an ephemeral authority and invisible, inhumane powers that patrol and decide characters’ destinies. The first group eventually acquires the same physical characteristics and attitudes, while the invisible powers correspond to figures like Fate, Chance, God or the Devil. The representations of power fulfill a series of similar roles. Each of the seven novels studied in this essay uses techniques which emphasize the narrator’s own awareness of the act of writing. The analysis of the mise en abyme, metalepsis and transtextuality in the narrative allows for a systematic determination and evaluation of the effectiveness of metafiction.

This study is an examination of the protagonists in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited. The purpose of this study is to show how each novel displays the same type of character progressing towards heroism. This type of heroism is explained by using Carol Pearson's The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By. Using Pearson's archetypes to discuss these protagonists gives one a better understanding of the characters and their development as they move towards self-knowledge. The introduction explains the term hero and gives a brief review of Pearson's book. Chapters two, three and four are each devoted to one of the specified novels and contain an examination of how the protagonist progresses through Pearson's archetypes. Chapter five is the conclusion, which summarizes this study and states the usefulness of archetypes in understanding the development of a character, as well as the importance of taking the heroic journey.