Few critics have had a greater impact upon the theory of poetry than T.S. Eliot. His critical works, spanning the decades of his literary career, embody a theory of poetry and by a careful scrutiny of his many essays, reviews and interviews, it is possible to formulate definite requirements for works in the genre of poetry. Beginning with the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919, Eliot stresses certain aspects of poetry that must be carefully considered by the poet, and Eliot does not radically alter his attitudes throughout his career. Eliot insists in his earliest essays that the poet must recognize the value of tradition to his work. To Eliot, tradition represents not only a knowledge of the past, but an assimilation of this past into one’s life. The artist must have a definite sense of tradition and realize that his work does not stand apart from all other art. Rather, each new work of art will modify the old existing order. Another element of poetry that Eliot considers important is prosody. Eliot insists that free verse is impossible; the poet can only thoroughly master technique, then has he the freedom to depart from the standard forms. Eliot cautions the poet to not sacrifice the sense of a line for its sound, yet always be aware that the musicality reinforces the meaning of the poem. Perhaps the most familiar term Eliot uses is objective correlative. Although much has been written about his meaning, Eliot basically uses the term to signify the objectification of emotions and thoughts; it is a technique to elevate the subjective into the objective, while retaining a sense of immediacy. Eliot never concedes that poetry should only be a personal statement; the poet may begin with very personal feelings, but he must transform them into an impersonal statement. This demand by Eliot for impersonality includes his belief that the poet can best express the universal through the particular. He believes the imagery should be definite and specific. The poet should also use the vernacular speech of his era; he must avoid the appearance of artificiality of language. Finally Eliot comes to a clear position toward the role of philosophy in poetry. Early in his career he argued that no poet should sacrifice the quality of the poem artistically in order to employ it as a vehicle for a particular philosophy. Eliot, recognizing that a poet will incorporate personal beliefs into the poem, insists that these views should be there almost unconsciously. A too conscious striving to use poetry only as a statement of philosophy Eliot views as corrupting the role poetry should play. To Eliot, the function of poetry is to serve as an aesthetically satisfying expression of universal truths.

abstract: This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources. Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones. This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others. By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2018

Thèse de doctorat : Anglais : Rennes 2 : 2008. / Bibliogr. f. 421-455. Index des noms.

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

This thesis explores what the role of the artist provides to the colonial novel. Using William Plomer's novel Turbott Wolfe, the role of the Western artist in colonial South Africa is examined and critiqued, putting it in conversation with the art theory of Roger Fry and the Primitivism movement. In doing so, it explores themes such as desire, miscegenation, complexity, and carnival, showing that while artists partake in society, they also remain critical of it, responding to it in their artwork.

By the end of the Great War, Canadians had become more divided along cultural-linguistic lines than perhaps at any other point in their history. Issues surrounding French-language rights outside Quebec and Canada’s place in the British Empire had proved especially contentious leading up to and during the war. Twenty years later, however, the country was relatively united as it prepared to enter yet another global conflict. This study explores the important (albeit partial) rapprochement that occurred during the interwar period between English- and French-speaking Canadians, and in Quebec and Ontario in particular. Remarkably, this rapprochement was the result of both a ‘ground-up’ pressure from civil society, and cross-cultural accommodation occurring among political élites. Driven by a combination of idealism and self-interested pragmatism, Anglophone and Francophone intellectuals, academics, professionals, businessmen and other citizens who were deeply concerned about the country’s future led the call for a more tolerant, pluralistic and liberal Canadian society – one that would allow for greater acceptance of Canada’s French fact and for a higher degree of cross-cultural accommodation. Gradually, rapprochement began making its way into the public discourse – through professional and fraternal associations, popular culture, and through more positive contact with the ‘Other.’ As the rhetoric of cross-cultural understanding developed a wider audience, the political parties responded. The Liberal Party, especially, pressured by its own members from within civil society, became the political vehicle for rapprochement, and began to deal with the big issues of Francophone/Anglophone relations in ways that had been almost impossible a generation earlier.

This study examines how dialect can reflect people's heritage, socioeconomic status, and dis/entitlement status. It also examines how dialect has the ability to create social situations through codeswitching and language borrowing. I use the novels A Lesson Before Dying, The Lunatic, and Anthills of the Savannah to best explain my study. The novels take place in the United States, Jamaica, and West Africa. The theory that dialect reflects people's heritage, class, and dis/entitlement status is revealed through people from Africa and the African Diaspora and through people from Europe and the European diaspora. A conclusion is formulated after analyzing the characters' historical background, their living conditions, their educational status, and their actions toward others and themselves. The attributes of these characters, along with their dialect reveal a pattern that exists in real life. There are situations in which the dialect a person speaks determines how his or her life plays out. Ultimately, this thesis will reveal that people who speak standard dialects deal with similar situations, and people who speak nonstandard dialects deal with similar situations.

My dissertation maps the "scattered hegemonies" of the British Empire in the nineteenth-century British feminist utopian tradition. Beyond recovering this significant tradition of feminist thought and women's writing, my project considers the way these works both contest and replicate the dominant hegemony of the Victorian period. In the first chapter, "A Feminist Satirical Disutopia, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's New Amazonia," I argue that New Amazoniais a satirical disutopiathat bears witness to the dystopic reality of women's status in nineteenth-century Britain. Through elliptical critiques of her own feminist utopia, Corbett creates a hybrid genre, enabling a multifaceted critique of her present and the space for theorizing a feminist future. The second chapter, "The Extinction of Patriarchy: F.E. Mills Young's War of the Sexes as a Parody of Patriarchy," considers the function of the gendered role-reversal in Young's feminist utopia. War of the Sexes, like New Amazonia, is less concerned with imagining an ideal future and focuses instead on exposing and investigating gendered oppression in the Victorian period. Through role-reversal, Young critiques the separate spheres doctrine that constructs gender difference and shows that the doctrine has deleterious effects on the nation's development. While both New Amazoniaand War of the Sexescritique gender inequality through role-reversal, Florence Dixie's Glorianadirectly addresses inequality through sustained gender performance. In "From Reform to Revolution: Gender Subversion in Florence Dixie's Gloriana," I aver that Dixie uses the title character's cross-dressing to undermine the gender roles created by the separate spheres doctrine. Throughout Gloriana, Dixie illustrates that gender is a social construction and that gendered oppression has a complex relationship to other intersecting forms of oppression, especially classism and imperialism. In "India as Feminist Utopia: Gender, Identity, and Nation in Amelia Garland Mears' Mercia," I demonstrate that Mears unlike Dixie, sees the scattered hegemonies of Victorian culture as too embedded to correct. Whereas Dixie's heroine starts a feminist revolution in Britain, Mears' heroine abandons England to find feminist utopia in India. Yet even as Mears replicates stereotypes and exoticizes the Other, she, like Dixie, recognizes the value of intersectional feminist critique. All four of these chapters highlight the heterogeneity of feminist thought to be found in nineteenth-century feminist utopias. Yet, even the most disparate visions of a feminist future respond to the same scattered hegemonies of the British Empire. In the conclusion, I bring two feminist utopias not traditionally categorized as British into the conversation: Annie Denton Cridge's Man's Rightsand Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream. I include Cridge and Hossain as necessary components to complicate my analysis of the transnational flows of knowledge and the ways in which the scattered hegemonies of Empire continue to be replicated in Victorian literary studies and contemporary feminist thought in the Global North. I argue that the exclusion of works like Cridge's and Hossain's from the study of British literature further illustrates the persistent adherence to imperialistic nationalism in the Global North and point to a Global Anglophone feminist utopian tradition.

Women and men experience work differently owing to the gendered nature of work and workplaces, but there is limited insight into whether language and gender intersect to shape employment outcomes. This thesis project examines full-time employment in Ottawa-Gatineau to determine whether being French, English, or bilingual meaningfully influences employment status in the federal public service in terms of occupational attainment and employment income. A series of descriptive and inferential statistical analyses using the 2016 Canadian census are used to examine whether commuting patterns, occupational attainment, and annual employment income are significantly different across industrial sectors and between women and men, as well as between official language communities. The analysis reveals important differences in residential distribution between Anglophones and Francophones working in the federal public service as well as differences in commuting times, especially to suburban office locations. There are also important differences in occupational attainment and income attainment between women and men across official language communities, with women, especially francophone women, being more likely to occupy relatively low-pay administrative jobs in the federal public service compared to men or anglophone and bilingual women. In many ways, bilingualism in the federal public service is made real by the work of francophone women, although they are concentrated in some of the least-well paid occupations and stand to have ever more time consuming commutes as jobs are moved to suburban locations in Ottawa.

The setting of Milton’s great sequel is puzzling, being called a desert and a “waste wild” (IV. 523) repeatedly and at the same time including descriptions of protective oaks and woody mazes. These conflicting descriptions conjure up several questions: In which environment does the epic take place? Because Milton is so detailed in his adaptations of biblical narrative the inclusion of trees is quite perplexing. While he does tend to expand biblical narrative quite frequently – e.g. Paradise Lost – he rarely initiates a change without just cause. The crux of this particular change centers on what this just cause could be. How does the addition of a few trees change the overall effect of Milton’s brief epic? This thesis thus attempts to find further meaning in Paradise Regained’s setting by exploring three possibilities for this just cause while uncovering what the concept of a tree/forest means in early modern England.