Call number: LD2668 .T4 1965 S634 / Master of Science

T.S. Eliot's use of allusion is crucial to the structure and themes of his early poetry. It may be viewed as a compulsion, evident in even the earliest poems, rather than just affectation or elitism. His allusions often involve the reversal or re-ordering of constructions of gender in other literature, especially in other literary treatments of myth. Eliot's "classical" anti-Romanticism may be understood according to this dual concern with myth and gender, in that his poetry simultaneously derives from and attacks a perceived "feminised" Romantic tradition, one which focuses on female characters and which fetishises, particularly, a sympathetic portrayal of femmes fatales of classical myth, such as Circe, Lamia and Venus. Eliot is thus subverting, or "correcting", what are themselves often subversive genderings of myth. Another aspect of myth, that of the quest, is set in opposition to the predatory female by Eliot. A number of early poems place flâneur figures in the role of questers in a context of constraining feminine influence. These questers attempt, via mysticism, to escape from or blur gender and sexuality, or may be ensnared by such things in fertility rituals. A sadomasochistic motivation towards martyrdom is present in poems between 1911 and 1920. With its dual characteristics of disguise and exposure, Eliotic allusion to ritual and myth is itself a ritual (of literary re-enactment) based on a myth (of literature), namely Eliot's "Tradition". Allusive reconfiguration being a two-way process, Eliot's poetry is often implicitly subverted or "corrected" by its own allusions. Thus we are offered more complex representations of gender than may first appear; female characters may be viewed as sympathetic as well as predatory, male ones as being constructed often from representations of femininity rather than masculinity. The poems themselves demonstrate intense awareness of this fluctuation of gender, which appears in earlier poems as a threat, but in The Waste Land as the potential for a rapprochement between genders. This poem comprises multiple layers of re-enactments and reconfigurations of gender-in-myth, centring upon Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The Waste Land's treatment of myth should not be seen as merely reflecting a passing interest in anthropology, but as the culmination of concerns with myth and gender dating back to the earliest poetry. The complex interrelation of the two aspects leaves it unclear whether Eliot's allusive compulsion derives principally from a concern with mythologies of literature or from a concern with mythologies of gender.

This study attempts to establish a connection between the moral philosophy of F. H. Bradley, particularly as expressed in his Ethical Studies and modified in the teaching of Josiah Royce, and the moral thought of Eliot's poetic writings, beginning with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," culminating in Four Quartets, and finding a new mode of expression in the dramas. By tracing Eliot's moral thought to the nineteenth century anti-utilitarian moral controversies out of which Bradley's Ethical Studies grew, this study clarifies Eliot's position in the history of moral philosophy. For Bradley, the end of morality is not self-gratification; it is the realization of the universal will in the will of the individual. Hence the aim of moral action must be away from self-concern and toward the duties that society imposes on the individual. The Absolute, in which all individuals and societies culminate, invites us to true self-realization, while the egotistic self solicits us to physical and spiritual self-indulgence. Royce modifies Bradley's Absolute by making it a redemptive community in which the selfish actions of the past are given new meaning by heroic sacrifices in the present and future. The moral thought of Eliot's poetry and drama closely parallels this ethical system. In these works, Eliot dramatizes situations in which selfless motives are scarcely distinguishable from egotistic needs, merited suffering from heroic martyrdom. In Murder in the Cathedral, for instance, Thomas the Archbishop cannot will his martyrdom for the good of God's kingdom without also willing the gratification of his personal vanity. Four Quartets presents the same moral dilemma working itself out in Eliot's thoughts about his own life. He wonders if he has chosen his life as poet and critic as an unselfish response to duty--and hence as a path to God--or if he has chosen it out of personal vanity. In his considerations of time and eternity he comes to the conclusion that it is possible to redeem past mistakes by the present right intention.

John Eliot (1604-1690) has been called ‘the apostle to the Indians’. This thesis looks at Eliot not from the perspective of modern Protestant ‘mission’ studies (the approach mainly adopted by previous research) but in the historical and theological context of 17th century puritanism. Drawing on recent research on migration to New England, the thesis argues that Eliot, like many other migrants, went to New England primarily in search of a safe haven to practise pure reformed Christianity, not to convert Indians. Eliot’s Indian ministry started from a fundamental concern for the conversion of the unconverted, which he derived from his experience of the puritan movement in England. Consequently, for Eliot, the notion of New England Indian ‘mission’ was essentially conversion-oriented, Wordcentred, and pastorally focussed, and (in common with the broader aims of New England churches) pursued a pure reformed Christianity. Eliot hoped to achieve this through the establishment of Praying Towns organised on a biblical model – where preaching, pastoral care and the practice of piety could lead to conversion – leading to the formation of Indian churches composed of ‘sincere converts’. The thesis starts with a critical historiographical reflection on how missiologists deploy the term ‘mission’, and proposes a perspectival shift for a better understanding of Eliot (Chapter 1). The groundwork for this new perspective is laid by looking at key themes in recent scholarship on puritanism, focusing on motives for the Great Migration, millenarian beliefs, and the desire for Indian conversion (Chapter 2). This chapter concludes that Indian conversion and millenarianism were not the main motives for Eliot’s migration to the New World, nor were his thoughts on the millennium an initial or lasting motive for Indian ministry. Next, the thesis investigates Eliot’s historical and theological context as a minister, through the ideas of puritan contemporaries in Old and New England, and presents a new perspective on Eliot by suggesting that conversion theology and pastoral theology were the most fundamental and lasting motives for his Indian ministry (Chapter 3). After the first three chapters, which relocate Eliot in his historical context, the last three chapters consider Eliot’s pastoral activities with the Indians. These have usually been understood as ‘mission’, without sufficient understanding of Eliot’s historical and theological context in the puritan movement and how he applied its ideas to Indian ministry. The thesis examines Eliot’s views on ‘Praying Towns’ as settlements for promoting civility and religion, and ‘Indian churches’ as congregations of true believers formed by covenant (Chapter 4). It investigates Eliot’s activities in the Indian communities, to apply puritan theology and ministerial practice to the Indians as his new parishioners (Chapter 5). Finally, the thesis offers a comparison of puritan and Indian conversion narratives, to try to recover Praying Indians’ own voices about conversion and faith (Chapter 6). This analysis finds both similarities and differences. The extent of the similarities does not necessarily mean (as some have alleged) that puritanism was unilaterally imposed on the Indians. The evidence equally well suggests a nuanced picture of Eliot’s engagement with the Indians from the perspective of 17th century puritanism and its conversion-oriented parish ministry.

"Why did George Eliot live and Currer Bell die?" Victorian pseudonymity is seldom treated to any critical scrutiny - the only sustained interest has been in reading masculine pseudonyms as masks for "disreputable femininity," signs of the woman writer's "anxiety of authorship." This thesis proposes that pseudonymity is not a capitulation to gender ideology, but that a nom de plume is an exaggerated version of any authorial signature - the abstraction (or Othering) of a self into text which occurs in the production of "real" authors as well as fictional characters. After an introductory chapter presenting the theoretical issues of selfhood and authorship, I go on to discuss milieu - the contexts which produced Bronte and Eliot - including a brief history of pseudonymous novelists and the Victorian publishing and reviewing culture. The third and fourth chapters deal with pseudonymity as heccéité, offering "biographies" of the authorial personas "Currer Bell" and "George Eliot" rather than the women who created them, thus demonstrating the problems of biography and the relative, multiple status of identity. The three following chapters explore the concerns of pseudonymity through a reading of the novels: I treat Jane Eyre, Villette, and even Shirley as "autobiographical" in order to address the construction of self and narrative; I examine how Eliot's realist fictions (notably Scenes of Clerical Life, Romola, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda) trouble the "reality"/"fiction" binary; and finally I read Bronte specifically for her engagement with "dress," using queer theories of performativity with Victorian theories of clothing and conduct to question "readability" itself. My final chapter is concerned with agencement (adjustment) and "mythmaking": the posthumous biographical and critical practices surrounding these two writers reveal that an author's "name," secured through literary reputation, is not static or inevitable, but the result of constant process and revision.

Les poètes du début du vingtième siècle sont inquiets : hésitant entre idéalisme et matérialisme, liberté et déterminisme, création et évolution, ils errent dans une « zone » idéologique. Dans les premiers textes de Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) et Hart Crane (1899-1932), le désarroi est permanent. Il s’incarne sous différentes formes, du dédoublement de personnalité à l’extrême lassitude, tandis que l’ombre et un vent de fin du monde envahissent les poèmes. Les positions des poètes varient entre nihilisme, incertaines tentatives de syncrétisme et ironie mordante. Pourtant, passé leur première jeunesse, ils reconnaissent que leur inquiétude n’est pas une donnée personnelle mais un fait d’époque, peut-être même le fait essentiel, sur le plan de la pensée, de l’époque dite moderne : c’est « l’âge de la comparaison », selon les mots de Nietzsche. Ils renoncent alors à exprimer la singularité d’une vision individuelle, originale, voire bizarre, pour « rentrer dans le monde ». Rompant nettement avec les objectifs littéraires du symbolisme, ils entendent désormais devenir « la conscience de l’époque », exposer les idéologies incompatibles qui s’y côtoient, faire l’inventaire de ses contrastes. Dans le premier tiers du vingtième siècle, l’inquiétude idéologique est le mobile qui engage les poètes à redéfinir leur fonction dans la cité et l’un des grands moteurs de l’innovation esthétique : cubisme, simultanéisme, dialogisme et lyrisme épique. C’est ce parcours dont nous espérons dégager la cohérence et les principales étapes. / At the beginning of the XXth century poets were unsettled : hesitating between idealism and materialism, freedom and determinism, creation and evolution, they wandered in an ideological « waste land ». In the early works of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) and Hart Crane (1899-1932), distress assumed different forms: from split personality to extreme weariness. The poets’ positions bounced between nihilism, half-hearted attempts at syncretism and bitter irony. As they matured, they recognized however that their restlessness was not a personal matter but a product of the times, perhaps even the main feature, on the level of thought, of the so-called modern times : “the age of comparison”, in Nietzsche’s words. They then renounced to express the singularity of an individual, original, even bizarre vision, and chose to “go back to the world”. Breaking with the literary goals of symbolism, they aimed at becoming the “conscience of the times”, at exposing their conflicting ideologies, and at listing their contrasts. In the first third of the twentieth century, this ideological restlessness pushed poets to redefine their role in the city. It was one of the most powerful forces behind aesthetic innovation: cubism, simultaneism, dialogism and epic lyricism. In this study, we will examine the coherence and main stages of this process.

This thesis focuses on the motifs of courtship and marriage as experienced by the female characters in the novels published from the end of the 18th century till the second half of the 19th century. These novels include Evelina (1778), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Eyre (1847) and The Mill on the Floss (1860). As all these novels are written by female authors, the thesis provides a unique female perspective of the issue. The chosen texts deal with the motifs of courtship and marriage, play with the conventional discourse, and at the same time challenge the established perception of the role of a woman in the process of courting. Besides discussing the novels, I explore also the way the themes of courtship and marriage are presented in the original 18th and 19th century literature. For this purpose, I scrutinized various conduct books and essays of the period. The first chapter of the thesis is introductory and explains the main ideas and terms used in the thesis. The second chapter focuses on the social background the heroine comes from - her family, character and education. Hence, the role of the family is discussed in reference to the process of courtship. Great attention is given primarily to the role of a father as a possible social guardian and the model of a future husband. The third...

This dissertation draws on studies of gift exchange by cultural anthropologists and social theorists to examine representations of gifts and gift giving in nineteenth-century British novels. While most studies of the economic imagination of nineteenth-century literature rely on and respond to a framework formulated by classical political economy and consequently overlook nonmarket forms of social exchange, I draw on gift theory in order to make visible the alternate, everyday exchanges shaping social relations and identity within the English novel. By analyzing formal and thematic representations of gifting over the course of the nineteenth century, in novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, I consider the way that gift exchange relates and responds to the emergence of capitalism and consumer culture. I trace two distinct developments in nineteenth-century gift culture: the first, the emergence of an idealized view of the gift as purely disinterested, spontaneous, and free, and the second, the emergence of a view of charity as demoralizing to the poor. These developments, I contend, were distinct ideological formations of liberal economic society and reveal a desire to make the gift conform to individualism. However, I suggest further that these transformations of the gift proceeded unevenly, for in their attention to the logic and practice of giving, nineteenth-century writers both give voice to and subvert these cultural formations. Alongside the figure of the benevolent philanthropist, the demoralized pauper, and the quintessential image of altruism, the selflessly giving domestic woman, nineteenth-century novels present another view of gift exchange, one that sees the gift as a mix of interest and disinterest, freedom and obligation, and persons and things. Ultimately, by reading the gift relations animating nineteenth-century novels, I draw attention to the competing conceptions of selfhood underlying gift and market forms of exchange in order to offer a broader history of exchange and personhood. In its recognition of expansive conceptions of the self and obligatory gifts, this dissertation recovers a history of the gift that calls into question the ascendency of the autonomous individual and the view of exchange as an anonymous, self-interested transaction.

This dissertation begins from the problem that is built into realism as a literary genre: its commitment to capturing the unfiltered circumstances of human life will always be at odds with the artifice of its representational constructs and its fiction. In this study, I consider visuality as a central, productive part of this problem and seek intensely visual moments within realist novels where realism wages its own struggle with itself as it attempts to navigate its limitations and push forward its possibilities. These moments pause the narrative as they prioritize picture over action. As descriptive moments work to render visual images through words on the printed page, they are fraught with realism’s struggle to use the artifice of fiction as a means for approximating an ostensible reality. Facing this difficulty, realist practitioners take up vastly different strategies. In this project, I investigate why and how visuality is deployed so differently by those who chose to write in this mode. I seek that which is piercing in the nineteenth-century realist novel by locating moments of crisis and tension, both within the plot and also within the strategies of the stories’ delivery. These are moments where the novel becomes troubled by the visual, revealing the potential and limit of the image. In realism, visuality encompasses a broad and varied array of strategies, including instances of enargeia and ekphrasis, passages that seek to evoke a sense of place or milieu through a rich catalog of visual detail, expressive self-renderings in the dialog and inner monologs of the characters, explorations of the embodied act of seeing, and moments where perception fails or visual description exposes itself as insufficient. I consider a small group of canonical authors: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, who are of critical importance to this genre and to nineteenth century realism, as it moves towards modernism. By examining moments in their novels where descriptive imagery is at its most acute, I seek to explain how moments of intense visuality are crucial nodes where each author, using unique and distinctive methods, negotiates the problem of realist representation.

John Eliot (1604-1690) was known as the “apostle to the Indians” in both Old and New England during his lifetime. His goal of inculcating “civility” with religion among “praying Indians” is often noted as representing an agenda by New English missionaries for cultural assimilation. This dissertation argues that an appropriate understanding of Eliot’s motives and methodology in ministry to Native Americans obtains from a consideration of the Congregationalist and sacrament-centered spirituality he indicated in publications before and after King Philip’s War. Eliot’s mission was more shaped by ecclesiology than eschatology or the aim of cultural hegemony. Eliot intended “praying town” settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to provide Native enquirers the kind of communitarian experience he believed essential for the establishment and maintenance of congregations comprised of genuine converts who could as members in good standing together practice the Lord’s Supper. Communal life with sacramental practice would be the ultimate way for them to experience Christ’s presence. This study extends previous scholarship by employing a theological perspective to explicate Eliot’s understanding of covenantal theology and the work of the Spirit of Christ through various “means of grace.” The project incorporates the perspectives of early American historians; Puritan scholars, especially historians of doctrine; literary critics; and recent studies of colonial encounter that posit cultural negotiation. This dissertation suggests that Eliot’s practices in mission reflect the meaning of Congregationalist Puritanism in colonial context. It adds to the emerging picture of a variegated transatlantic Puritanism and suggests that Eliot’s corpus should be considered in studies of Puritan pneumatology, Christology, sanctification, the sacraments, and religious declension. Eliot’s contribution as a contextual theologian becomes clear when his writings are examined alongside select documents from contemporary interlocutors such as Richard Baxter, Daniel Gookin, William Hubbard, Increase Mather, Mary Rowlandson, and Thomas Shepard. The study also suggests that Eliot’s later literary productions in English reflect his experience in cross-cultural ministry more than is currently recognized, especially his Lord’s Supper preparative, The Harmony of the Gospels, in the Holy History of the Humiliation and Sufferings of Jesus Christ (1678).