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published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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The title of our thesis is The Myth of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and J.M. Coetzee's Foe. We intend to show how Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe story has become a renewed, transformed myth in the fictional works of Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee. In the first chapter, we will analyse the attitude of critics to Daniel Defoe, Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee's works, and we shall review the pertinent aspects of the three novelists' life. In the second chapter, we will define the concept of myth according to the African and European thinkers. We shall also stress the types, functions and myth's expressions in literary work. In the third chapter, we shall analyse and compare the characters of the three novels following the theory of A.J. Greimas which will be enriched by Evgueni Meletinski. We will divide the characters into protagonists, accessories, opponents, neutrals and absents. Analysis and comparison of the fictional characters will identify two major groups: colonizer and colonized. There will also be an examination of the meaning of characters' names used by the three novelists as well as our opinion on the fictional characters of Defoe, Tournier and Coetzee. Analysis of plot structures will show how the three novels are composed according to a cyclical pattern. The fourth chapter will be devoted to a comparative thematic analysis of solitude, sexuality and education. This will reveal the two faces of each theme as well as the hidden philosophy of the three novelists. And the fifth chapter will identify the narrative and stylistic techniques of the novels. It will show the kind of genre used by Defoe, Toumier and Coetzee as well as the letter and journal. It will also show the types of stylistic aspects of the three novels which are present in the novels. We will examine in the sixth chapter the spaces and the time framework of the three novels. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

iv, 374 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.1980) from the Dept. of English, University of Adelaide

This thesis investigates acts of ‘re-telling’ in four selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and Alan Warner.Re-telling, as I have defined it, refers to the re-imagining and re-writing of existing narratives from mythology, fairy tale, and folktale, as well as the re-visioning of scientific discourses and historiography. I argue that this re-telling is representative of a contemporary cultural phenomenon, and is evidence of a postmodern genre that some literary theorists have termed re-visionary fiction. Despite the prevalent re-telling of canonical stories throughout literary history, there is much evidence for the emergence of a specifically contemporary trend of re-visionary literature. Part One of this thesis comprises two chapters which deal with Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Weight (2005) respectively. In these chapters, I argue that, although the feminist and historiographic elements of her work are significant, there exist further motivations for Winterson’s acts of re-telling in both Sexing the Cherry and Weight. In Chapter One, I analyse Winterson’s subversion and re-imagining of historiography, as well as her re-telling of fairy tale, in Sexing the Cherry. Chapter Two provides a discussion of Winterson’s re-telling of the myth of Atlas from Greek mythology, in which she draws on the discourses of science, technology, and autobiography, in Weight. Part Two focuses on Warner’s first two novels, Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997). In both novels, Warner re-imagines aspects of Christian, Celtic and pagan mythology in order to debunk the validity of biblical archetypes and narratives in a contemporary working-class setting, as well as to endow his protagonist with goddess-like or mythical sensibilities. Chapter Three deals predominantly with Warner’s use of language, which I argue is central to his blending of mythological and contemporary content, while Chapter Four analyses his use of myth in these two novels. This thesis argues that while both Winterson and Warner share many of the aims associated with contemporary re-visionary fiction, their novels also exceed the boundaries of the genre in various ways. Winterson and Warner may, therefore, represent a new class of re-visionary writers, whose aim is not solely to subvert the pre-text but to draw on its generic discourses and thematic conventions in order to demonstrate the generic and discursive possibilities inherent in the act of re-telling.

The thesis studies the social criticism in five English novels written between 1850 and 1913. All the novels can be located in the central tradition of realistic English fiction. The thesis focuses on the thematic similarities of three Victorian novels: Great Expectations, Hard Times, and Middlemarch, and two early modern novels: Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers. The novels voice the authors' criticisms of social, and more specifically family, conditioning. The novelists portray the arbitrary ethical norms that define and regulate behavior within specific social environments. Each novel describes the individual's aspirations which are ultimately frustrated by external forces. Although more than half a century separates the publications of Hard Times and Sons and Lovers the critical perspectives of the novelists are essentially the same. The thesis isolates aspects of the novels which realistically portray the attitudes and values of mid and late Victorian society. One avenue of investigation discusses those institutions which enforce the prevailing social doctrine. The dramatic conflict analyzed in this thesis is often between the adolescent and characters, usually older, who personify the repressive doctrine. Much of the anxiety experienced by the protagonists is a result of the confrontation of individual desire and internalized social norms. In Great Expectations and Hard Times Dickens portrays the childhood and adolescent consciousness as it emerge's within a given moral climate. The thesis analyzes how Dickens isolates and criticizes those aspects of Gradgrindery which are dehumanizing and soul-destroying. The first chapter also compares the experiences of the protagonists in Middlemarch to those of Great Expectations and Hard Times. George Eliot heightens the psychological realism by detailing the subjective conflicts within characters. The second chapter describes how Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers maintain the focus on the external manipulation of individual desire. The thesis compares how Hardy and Lawrence chronicle the crucial childhood and adolescent experiences of Jude Fawley and Paul Morel respectively. The second chapter analyzes those relationships and conflicts of the major and minor characters which amplify the theme of social repression. The final chapter of the thesis discusses another manifestation of social repression in Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers. In these novels this theme is expressed, for the first time in English fiction, in explicit sexual terms. The thesis isolates those external influences, both social and domestic, which inhibit the psycho-sexual development of Jude Fawley and Paul Morel. The family, largely maternal, conditioning of Sue Bridehead and Miriam Leivers is also analyzed as another amplification of the central thematic focus on social conditioning. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Twentieth century women's novels dramatize the daughter's conflicting desires to merge and to separate. Daughters are pulled between the passivity implied by attachment and autonomy they may construe as isolation. A psychoanalytic approach helps to illumine the struggles of daughters to reconcile the need for independence and the need for autonomy. In the struggle to define her own identity, a woman must learn to accept both her kinship with the mother and her separateness. In twentieth century women's novels, heroines have been moving away from the typical Victorian solutions to female identity—marriage and self-sacrifice. In an early novel such as May Sinclair's Mary Olivier, the heroine sacrifices her chance for marriage and remains tied to her mother's side; spiritually, however, she escapes into a mystical detachment. In Edith Wharton's novels, heroines are often caught in a love triangle, unable to reconcile their needs for mother love and sexual love; usually they end up alone. In later novels such as Doris Lessing's, the heroine leaves home to discover her own identity, but because she remains so closely identified with the mother, rejection of the mother means self-rejection. She struggles, then, to accept ambivalence toward her mother and toward herself, finally gaining a vision of integration through fantasy. Finally, in three recent novels—Lady Oracle, Jerusalem the Golden, and Earthly Possessions—the daughters learn that they cannot deny their mothers and their past in order to create themselves anew; they must re-discover the bond with the mother, but this time as adults rather than children. In Lady Oracle and Jerusalem the Golden, daughters struggle with guilt and self-hatred before they learn to recognize their underlying love for the mother. In Earthly Possessions, the heroine moves through emotional recognition of the mother-bond to discover a capacity for both intimacy and separateness. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Typescript (photocopy) Includes bibliography.