In each of her Canadian-set novels, Margaret Laurence features a female protagonist searching for her identity. Hagar, in The Stone Angel; Rachel, in A Jest of God; Stacey, in The Fire-Dwellers; and Morag, in The Diviners--each one, in her own way and with a different degree of success, attempts to discover who she is and what her life means. Through these characters, Laurence expresses her faith in the power of language, for it is at least partly through language that each achieves her measure of victory and comes to terms with herself and her life.For Hagar Shipley, words used precisely, cleverly, and artistically constitute a source of pleasure and pride. Yet Hagar often uses language to assert her superiority and otherwise to distance herself from others and from life. Her epiphany arrives late, but not too late for her to speak at least once "the heart's truth." Rachel Cameron, like Hagar, demonstrates a keen sensitivity to language. Rachel, however, listens to the words and voices which she hears in an effort not to control others but to discover an authentic voice, and thus an identity, of her own. As she learns to speak of herself to others, she also learns that disclosure is not always necessary, for silence can heal as well as threaten.Rachel's sister Stacey also learns to accept silence. Terrified by the violence of modern life, Stacey seeks to build bridges between herself and those she loves. Her frequent failures to communicate lead her to question the efficacy of language, but in the end she affirms language as a means of communication as she also comes to see that "the silences aren't all bad." Her conclusions are shared by Morag Gunn, who has as a successful "wordsmith" made words her life, yet who has learned to accept occasional silences. Morag's relationships with others and her achievements as a novelist have convinced her of the power, as well as the limitations, of language, a conviction that we can assume her creator, Margaret Laurence, shares.

My thesis is titled Modeling the Public Intellectual: The Case of Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold, arguably the most influential critic of his age (Trilling 190) has also proven to be an influential model for the public intellectual currently in Canada and elsewhere. The role and work of public intellectuals is complex and who or what they are is the topic of vigorous debate and sometimes extreme disagreement. Because Arnold is so influential and controversial as a literary and social critic, I want to develop and to communicate a better understanding of his achievements and to explore the connection between his work and the role of the public intellectual. To that end, I draw on three of his works, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864), Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Literature and Dogma (1873). In the course of a decade, Arnold asserts and expands the role of criticism in society and the kinds of issues a poet, critic, and inspector of schools feels competent to address while defining his own personal version of the Victorian Sage (Holloway). I also want to explore why criticism produced in the nineteenth century, particularly in Arnolds work, promotes the figure and activities of the public intellectual. Moreover, I will reaffirm, via Arnolds example, the importance of the relationship between literature and life and show how this connection nourishes the idea of the public intellectual in the English-speaking world.

Robert Penn Warren has a facility for transforming region and history into fiction and poetry. His novel Flood: A Romance of Our Time (1964) and his poem sequence “Internal Injuries” (1968) stand out insofar as they share a leitmotif; that is, he uses images of imprisonment to represent the loss of free and responsible selfhood under a technocratic dispensation. He is the quintessential loneliness artist, as can be heard through the voices of his characters. His literary criticism is a testament to his concerns about how one comes to reconcile oneself to place. His theory of literature provides us a unique window on what it means to discover oneself in the tumult of a rapidly changing landscape. The use and misuse of technology to augment one’s relationship to place and self is my overriding concern. In Fiddlersburg, the town in Flood, melodrama hangs in the air like rotting perfume. All that will remain once the town is flooded is the penitentiary. In “Internal Injuries,” Warren’s poem-within-a-poem sequence about the loss of self within the modern city, Warren invokes the penitentiary to represent and speak for the loss of self and the feeling of lonesomeness. Flood speaks to “Internal Injuries” in the sense that Warren oscillates between the discovery of self in Flood to the loss of self in “Internal Injuries.” I give my observation of how Warren’s critical work forms a dialogue with his creative work, offering insight as to how the oldest maximum-security penitentiary in Kentucky speaks to the lost and found selves of Warren’s world. Finally, I deal with the problem of modernity and Warren’s perennial concern about the alienation of the self and how he wrestles with it from a deeply personal and experiential perspective. The reader will find that Warren’s critical and creative works form a kind of inside passage.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 357-384).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hamburgische Universität, 1930. / Vita. Errata leaf inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-94).

Inaug.-Diss.--Cologne. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 355-366.

Thesis--Bonn. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 368-405) and index.

Thesis--Lund. / Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-183) and index.

Diss.--Tübingen. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 274-307.

Inaug.-diss.--Munich. / Lebenslauf. "Quellenverzeichnis": p. 257-266.