This thesis examines the nature of what I have termed "the sacramental vision" of Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Jones: it is an exploration of the mutually sustaining relationship between poetry and religion; or, as Jones puts it, between art and sacrament. The key to the relationship is to be found in language: the inherited language of theologian and poet is saturated with metaphor, sign and symbol, linguistic forms of a particularly resistant and irreducible kind. In literature, as in religion, such forms represent ultimate points of vision, to which in trust we assent, and from which we infer belief, that is, we are required to convert what begins as "an impression upon the Imagination" into a belief which may be tested by reason. The poet's renewal of such sacramental signs is a necessary exercise of the religious imagination if each generation is to remake the beliefs it has inherited. The opening chapter is an examination of the origins of Hopkins's and Jones's use of the sacramental sign and the subsequent chapters scrutinise the value of sign-making to the development of the poetic method of both poets. I suggest that this method is best elucidated through three controlling principles: the Coleridgean view of the sacramental potential of language helps to define the verbal content of the poem; the Thornist sacramental schema instresses the form of the poem; and the Newmanesque process of notional and real assent determines the grammar or inscape of the total oeuvre as a chronicle of the development of the poet's spiritual growth. Hopkins and Jones deepen our understanding of a grammar common to faith and belief, shared by poet and theologian, by claiming that poetry should be the tranforming crucible of the encounter between the experience of the poet, the reader and the divine.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2001. / Also available online.

This thesis investigates the history of labour management at David Jones, the major Australian retailer and manufacturer, between the years 1838 and 1958. This thesis examines the development of consent-based approach to labour management at David Jones, in particular the development of paternalism and welfarism. In doing so this thesis explores both general questions regarding the factors that influence why certain firms adopt a consent-based approach to labour management, as well as informing debates around the existence of nineteenth century paternalism and the origins of twentieth century welfarism. The historical material contained at the David Jones Archives and elsewhere reveals little evidence of paternalism as a deliberate management strategy. This brings into question the usefulness of paternalism as a concept in the historical study of Australian labour management. The inability to trace paternalism also undermines explanations of twentieth century welfarism premised on the pre-existence of nineteenth century paternalism. The historical materials, however, do note that twentieth century welfarism was a deliberate labour management strategy adopted by David Jones management. Welfarism, combined with systematic management and training, was initially adopted following the First World War to deal with the threat of industrial turmoil. However, in the 1930s, welfarism increasingly became a pro-active strategy designed to create skilled selling and raise the profile of the firm within the community. Further, welfarism at David Jones in the inter-war period was more than merely a new form of paternalism, somehow transformed by being in a larger, more bureaucratic setting or a result of employers confronted an increasingly feminised workforce. Welfarism at David Jones was a deliberate strategy, informed by overseas experiments, management consultants and the new science of psychology. Welfarism at David Jones continued into the post World War Two period. However, new forms of retailing, in particular self-service, undermined attempts to create skilled selling. Elements of welfarism remain at David Jones and continue to support the firm???s corporate image as a provider of high-quality customer service.

This study proposes an approach to a solution for the problem of the perceived ‚separatedness‛ of language from reality which employs the rhetorical concept of ethos, the doctrinal concept of the Chalcedonian definition of the nature of the incarnated Christ, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‚answerability.‛ As an alternative to theories of reading and interpretation based on the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning, radical skepticism, and the death of the author, the approach defined in this study emphasizes affirmation of the centrality of the human person and the necessity of close, loving attention as the grounds of both aesthetic vision and ethical action. Developing three exemplary readings of novelized epics including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones, the study demonstrates how loving, careful attention to ethos—the definition of which is expanded to include relationships between language and character in literary works, genres, characters, authors, and teachers—is the prerequisite for answerability in literary relationships. Whether one is primarily interested in authors, characters, genres, canon, readers, or critical reception, attention to ethos illuminates the ways in which responses to literary works are conditioned by and analogous to responses to persons. The complex and irreducible relationships between the ‚word‛ and the ‚person‛ require an individual answerability for which there is no alibi. Ultimately, the ‚word‛ and the ‚world‛ are united in the answerable person, whether that person is an author, a character, a reader, a critic or a teacher.

This study proposes an approach to a solution for the problem of the perceived ‚separatedness‛ of language from reality which employs the rhetorical concept of ethos, the doctrinal concept of the Chalcedonian definition of the nature of the incarnated Christ, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‚answerability.‛ As an alternative to theories of reading and interpretation based on the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning, radical skepticism, and the death of the author, the approach defined in this study emphasizes affirmation of the centrality of the human person and the necessity of close, loving attention as the grounds of both aesthetic vision and ethical action. Developing three exemplary readings of novelized epics including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones, the study demonstrates how loving, careful attention to ethos—the definition of which is expanded to include relationships between language and character in literary works, genres, characters, authors, and teachers—is the prerequisite for answerability in literary relationships. Whether one is primarily interested in authors, characters, genres, canon, readers, or critical reception, attention to ethos illuminates the ways in which responses to literary works are conditioned by and analogous to responses to persons. The complex and irreducible relationships between the ‚word‛ and the ‚person‛ require an individual answerability for which there is no alibi. Ultimately, the ‚word‛ and the ‚world‛ are united in the answerable person, whether that person is an author, a character, a reader, a critic or a teacher.

This thesis investigates the history of labour management at David Jones, the major Australian retailer and manufacturer, between the years 1838 and 1958. This thesis examines the development of consent-based approach to labour management at David Jones, in particular the development of paternalism and welfarism. In doing so this thesis explores both general questions regarding the factors that influence why certain firms adopt a consent-based approach to labour management, as well as informing debates around the existence of nineteenth century paternalism and the origins of twentieth century welfarism. The historical material contained at the David Jones Archives and elsewhere reveals little evidence of paternalism as a deliberate management strategy. This brings into question the usefulness of paternalism as a concept in the historical study of Australian labour management. The inability to trace paternalism also undermines explanations of twentieth century welfarism premised on the pre-existence of nineteenth century paternalism. The historical materials, however, do note that twentieth century welfarism was a deliberate labour management strategy adopted by David Jones management. Welfarism, combined with systematic management and training, was initially adopted following the First World War to deal with the threat of industrial turmoil. However, in the 1930s, welfarism increasingly became a pro-active strategy designed to create skilled selling and raise the profile of the firm within the community. Further, welfarism at David Jones in the inter-war period was more than merely a new form of paternalism, somehow transformed by being in a larger, more bureaucratic setting or a result of employers confronted an increasingly feminised workforce. Welfarism at David Jones was a deliberate strategy, informed by overseas experiments, management consultants and the new science of psychology. Welfarism at David Jones continued into the post World War Two period. However, new forms of retailing, in particular self-service, undermined attempts to create skilled selling. Elements of welfarism remain at David Jones and continue to support the firm???s corporate image as a provider of high-quality customer service.

The Great War narrative has been the subject of wide scholarship but there have been no studies that have specifically focused on understanding the ethical and aesthetic struggles of the artist in war, the artist’s dilemma. The generation that experienced the Great War included many giants of twentieth-century intellectual, cultural, and political life, many of whom wrote personal narratives of their experiences. These narratives have contributed to shaping familial stories and the meta-narratives of nation states for generations—sometimes limiting a fuller understanding of the war. Through this thesis I aim to open the field of narrative investigation into a wider inquiry through applying what Brian Lande identifies as the ‘sensual and moral conversion’ of the soldier in war, to the artistic actor in the theatre of war. The proposition is to identify and read beyond generic conventions, then to observe the process, the tasks, and the moral, psychosocial, and aesthetic dilemmas of the artist in the theatre of war. To do this, the work focuses on three robust texts of the Great War: Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929), Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937). The project explores not only the nuance of creative witness, self-witness, and testimony, but proposes a fuller empathic engagement with the narrative within the social contract of war writing. After developing a model of the formal conventions which structure the genre of war writing, and building on the work of Max Saunders, Henri LeFebvre, and others, I have carried out close readings of the three authors’ Great War narratives and related works. With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses literary, artistic, historical, ethical, and sociological studies, and with extensive archival research, I propose to introduce another perspective on reading between the lines of Great War narratives. This perspective encompasses the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas that faced the artists of the war generation as they acted and reacted to war, a generation that shaped the intellectual, political, scientific, and artistic life of the twentieth century, and the lives of generations to follow.

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This thesis examines the ways in which the Celtic aesthetic emerges in case studies of four writers from the last century: Brian O'Nolan (under the pseudonyms Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen), David Jones, George Mackay Brown, and John McGahern. It considers a wide selection of their writing across literary genres, including the novel, the short story, the essay, and poetry, but privileges prose and fiction. This study undertakes a formal analysis of these texts using a conceptual, thematic, and critically biographical approach. The archival methodology informing such an approach brings new scholarship into focus that either aligns these authors for the first time or reevaluates their relationships. O'Nolan, Jones, Brown, and McGahern are united here because they put forward their own theories of the Celtic aesthetic and modernized these differing representational strategies when they applied them in their fictional practices. My analysis of each writer begins with a definition of the "Celtic Aesthetic" then draws out how the Celtic is represented in his literary work, showing what we gain from reading the work within a modernist Celtic aesthetic. O'Nolan proposes a Celtic realism within a modernist understanding of the unity between form and content. He writes within a collaborative framework, retrieving modes of thought and literary effects from medieval Irish sources and scholarly texts. He and his peers were concerned with making an Irish-Celtic contribution to modern literature. David Jones develops a visual aesthetic in an Anglo-Welsh context, arguing that the Celtic enhances the potential for metamorphosis through a combination of contraries. Jones establishes a connection between the First World War and ancient Welsh tradition to symbolically pattern the experience of fighting in the trenches. George Mackay Brown shares this idea about Celtic metamorphosis and war. He claims the Celtic is a decorative aesthetic, one that is bound up with Roman Catholic theology and his understanding of Eucharistic anamnesis. Writing almost exclusively about the Orkney islands, Brown portrays the Celtic as an aspect of the Orkney's archipelagic modernism, informed by his own Scottish Gaelic linguistic heritage but also connected by sea to Wales and Ireland. John McGahern implies his theory about Celtic style in his discussions of Gaelic linguistic inheritance and the effect this produces on his English writing. McGahern also shares Brown's mysticism and O'Nolan's practice of depicting eternity in the West of Ireland. There are thus three converging lines of inquiry that will frame this project: first, how does this minor strain in modernist literature animate this set of literary works? Second, how do those characteristics inform our understanding of what the term "Celtic" means in a twentieth-century context and for contemporary readers? And third, what does this contribute to the current field of modernist studies? The Celtic for these writers is transnational, hybrid, decorative, and the means through which their questions about violence and despoliation could find expression in twentieth-century literature.