This study is an inquiry into the relationship between the contemporary American writer's understanding of American reality and his attempt to convey this reality by the use of an insane first-person point of view character. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the insane narrator's point of view not only recreates the feeling of absurdity through the disjointed point of view of the madman, but also points to the absurdity in contemporary American life. The first part of this study analyzes the narrators in Henderson the Rain King, The Bell Jar, and Lancelot. The second part uses A Fan's Notes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Breakfast of Champions to discuss the problems that arise from the use of an insane narrator.

This thesis serves to classify Black Humor as a philosophy, which holds that the world is meaningless and absurd, and as a literary technique. Historical origins are discussed and the idea is related to a reflection of the middle-class syndrome of twentieth century man. Close philosophical and literary relatives are presented and a pure work isn't defined. Black Humor literary characteristics are described in terms of style, theme, plot, setting, chronology, and characteristic ending. Black Humor characters are classified as "non-heroes" divided into four categories. Prevalent use and treatment of traditional forbidden subjects of sex, defecation, money, violence, emotionlessness, religion, death, and "illogical" logic are stressed. In summary, Cat's Cradle is examined in light of the Black Humor characteristics described and found to be other than a pure Black Humor work.

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The purpose of this study is to explore a phenomenon which is both literary and social: the popularity of didactic Christian novels in twentieth-century American literature. Specifically, the study is restricted to a consideration of best-selling Christian novels and an examination of the attitudes of American readers over a time of extreme social change in America, 1918-1953. Nineteen such novels were best sellers over the thirty-five years encompassed by the study. One was popular between World War I and the Depression, five were best sellers between 1929 and 1939, and the remainder were best sellers between 1939 and 1953. The data suggest that within the period 1918-1953, public interest in Christian novels increased during times of national stress but waned in times of prosperity.The popular Christian novels mirrored the concerns of the reading public, for subject matter, theme, and characterization of the novels tend to reflect the era in which a given novel is published. The one novel popular between the end of World War I and the Depression was Ralph Connor's The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land (1919), an unabashedly anti-German propaganda novel incorporating elements of Christian thought. Between 1919 and 1929, Americans were preoccupied with social change and the prosperity of the times, and thus demonstrated little interest in fictional piety.In the Depression, five novels by Lloyd C. Douglas were immensely popular: Magnificent Obsession (1929), Forgive Us Our Trespasses (1932), Green Light (1935), White Banners (1936), and Disputed Passage (1939). All were contemporaneous in setting, and paradoxically stressed the practice of altruistic self-giving along with the promise of material rewards for the follower of Christianity. Clearly, Douglas appealed to the public because his works were optimistic and because they offered to the reader the hope that Christianity might provide relief from economic distress.From 1939 through 1953, thirteen Christian novels became best sellers. Seven were historical Christian novels: The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1949) by Sholem Asch; The Robe (1942) and The Big Fisherman (1948) by Lloyd C. Douglas; The Song of Bernadette (1942) by Franz Werfel; and The Silver Chalice (1953) by Thomas B. Costain. The historical novels tended to become more conservative and restrained than Douglas' novels of the Depression. Their popularity points to tendencies in Americans to look to the past and to ancient values in search of answers to contemporary problems.Six Christian novels published 1939-1953 were generally contemporaneous in setting. Significantly, four were either by or about Roman Catholics: A. J. Cronin's The Keys of the Kingdom (1941), Russell Janney's The Miracle of the Bells (1946), Henry Morton Robinson's The Cardinal (1950), and Francis Cardinal Spellman's The Foundling (1951). Two by Agnes Sligh Turnbull were Protestant: The Bishop's Mantle (1947) and The Gown of Glory (1952). Four of these novels depicted clergymen as protagonists. The popularity of these novels indicated widespread concern for religion and curiosity about churchmen. The acceptance of Roman Catholicism in popular fiction is of major significance, for no popular Christian novels before 1939 were distinctly pro-Catholic. A more tolerant mood is clearly indicated for the American novel-reading public.It is clear from this study that almost all popular Christian novels widely accepted between 1918 and 1953 advanced a simplistic and rewarding Christianity. Inevitably the theology is uncomplicated, and most of the works adapt Christianity to the needs of the day. Religious attitudes are emphatically this-worldly. Little eschatological content is apparent; readers and writers alike were apparently more concerned with a religious faith which provided strength and guidance for living well in the present, rather than providing a means of preparation for a heavenly afterlife.

This thesis examines the forms of utopianism which developed in U.S. fiction after the Civil War, from Mark Twain to Jack London. It covers the genres and subgenres of the utopia of reform, the fiction of occult utopianism, the lost-race romance, the post-catastrophe utopia, and the dystopia. Its central argument is that utopianism provides a means of developing alternative horizons of historiosophy and of building images of otherness, as it is also an argumentative apparatus which allows utopists to comment on their empirical society, as the other side of otherness. Nineteenth-century U.S. utopian fiction conveyed, through an increasing deconstruction of the utopian genre, conflicting interpretations of such elements of American myth-history as the stock image of America as a new Eden and paradise of abundance, the American Dream, and Manifest Destiny. This helps explain the fragmentation of the utopian genre within literary discourse and its cooptation by modern science fiction as it developed after the first decade of the twentieth century.

Henry Dan Piper has exploded the legend that all of Fitzgerald' s books where out of print when he died. There may be similar romantic exaggeration which does not bear examination in the popular view that Fitzgerald's reputation as an artist was eclipsed in his later years and magically revived after his death by the editing and publication by Edmund Wilson in 1941 of the unfinished novel Last Tycoon, and of The Crack-Up. Investigation by Matthew J. Bruccoli has shown the essential oversimplification inherent in the widely-held belief that Fitzgerald's last complete novel to be published, Tender is the Night was dismissed or ignored by reviewers demanding novels of social conscience. Fitzgerald attracted legends and since his death has become something of a folk-hero the type of the golden boy who achieved early and instantaneous fame, lives riotously and is then engulfed by the backwash of his own youthful folly somehow leaving an unpublished masterpiece to confound his critics at his early death. Preface, p. 1.

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