No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

[...] This study attempts to define and articulate the essentially ordered rhythms of meaning governing Wolfe's quest for psychic fulfillment. It seeks to explain his significant relationships and decisions in terms of the 'exile motif': Wolfe's perennial and heroic struggle to overcome the forces of background and temperament, which made him a stranger and exile, in order to establish a normal life for himself. [...]

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.

As to form, Wolfe's novels are deliberately loose, because that is important to his purpose. Conceiving America as an open society of potentiality, he could do no less than remain open himself. To do otherwise would have meant impotence if not sterility. In this thesis, I shall attempt to show that the episodes, divergences, and observations all illustrate and amplify this spiritual growth.

This study compares and contrasts the work of Thomas Wolfe and Walt Whitman.