Thesis (M.A.I.S.)--Oregon State University, 1999. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.) in English--University of Maine, 2006. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-49).

"The procedure followed in writing this paper has been to read and analyze these significant publications of Rebecca West and all available information concerning her life. Publications and their editions were identified in The United States Catalog, Cumulative Book Index, and the Library of Congress Catalogs. Bibliographic tools used in the search for biographical information include Essay and General Literature Index, Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, International Index to Periodical Literature, New York Times Index, and Biography Index"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1959." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-79).

Given Rebecca West's fame during her lifetime, the amount of significant and successful writing she created, and the importance and relevance of the topics she took up, remarkably little has been done to examine her intellectual legacy. Writing in most genres, West has created a body of work that illuminates, to a large degree, the social, artistic, moral, and political evolution of the twentieth century. West, believing in the unity of human experience, explored such topics as Saint Augustine, Yugoslavian history, treason in World War II, and apartheid in South Africa with the purpose of finding what specific actions or events meant in the light of the whole of human experience. The two major archival sources for Rebecca West materials are located at the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Special Collections, and at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Many of her works have been recently reprinted and those not easily available are found in the British Library or in the archival depositories noted above. Interviews with persons who knew West were also an important source of information. This dissertation explores chronologically West's numerous works of nonfiction, and uses her fiction where it is appropriate to place into context social, historical, or biographical topics. The manner in which she took up the topics of feminism, art, religion, nationalism, war, history, treason, spying, and apartheid demonstrate the wide-ranging mind of an intellectual historian and social critic. Though her eclecticism makes her a difficult subject, the diversity of her mind and her talent in expressing her thoughts, allow her work to symbolize and illuminate twentieth century intellectual history. Known for her elegant fiction, and forceful personal style, West should also be known as a thinker and social critic. What is common to her eclectic opera is that she forcefully propounded ideas, shook loose staid preconceptions, and recommended new ways of perceiving politics, religion, art, culture, law, and morality.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Also available in print.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 1999. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 237-258). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9955910.

This thesis explores the gendered symbolism of women's music lessons in English fiction, 1870-1914. I consider canonical and non-canonical fiction in the context of a wider discourse about music, gender and society. Traditionally, women's music lessons were a marker of upper- and middle-class respectability. Musical ‘accomplishment' was a means to differentiate women in the ‘marriage market', and the music lesson itself was seen to encode a dynamic of obedient submission to male authority as a ‘rehearsal' for married life. However, as the market for musical goods and services burgeoned, musical training also offered women the potential of an independent career. Close reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin (1877), I discuss four young women who negotiate their marital and vocational choices through their interactions with powerful music teachers. Through the lens of the music lessons in Emma Marshall's Alma (1888) and Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1893), I consider the issues of class, respectability and social emulation, paying particular attention to the relationship between aesthetic taste and moral values. I continue by considering George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) alongside Elizabeth Godfrey's Cornish Diamonds (1895), texts in which female pupils exhibit genuine power, eventually eclipsing both their music teachers and the artist-suitors for whom they once modelled. My final chapter discusses three texts which problematize the power of women's musical performance through depicting female music pupils as ‘New Women' in conflict with the people around them: Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895), D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser (1912) and Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913). I conclude by looking forward to representations of women's music lessons in the modernist period and beyond, with a reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Wind Blows' (1920) as well as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956).