A recurrent premise of post-war criticism is that World War II marked the end of the American working class novel. This thesis challenges this assumption and argues that the working class novel redeveloped throughout the 1940s and 1950s in response to major social, political, economic and cultural changes in the United States. A prime justification for the obituary on the working class novel was that after 1945 the United States no longer had class divisions. However, as the first two chapters of this study point out, such a view was promulgated by influential literary critics and social scientists who, as former Marxists, were keen to distance themselves from class politics. Insisting that the working class novel was hamstrung by a dogmatic Marxist politics and a fealty to social realism, these critics argued that the genre's relevance depended on the outdated politics and conditions of the 1930s. As such they were able to use literary criticism as a means of justifying their own ambiguous politics and deflecting any close scrutiny of their accommodation with the post-war liberal consensus. In a close examination of four writers in the subsequent chapters it is shown that, in fact, working class writers were extremely successful in adapting to post-war conditions. Harvey Swados, in his novel On the Line (1957) and in his journalism, provides crucial insights into the effects of the transition from a Fordist to a post-industrial society on the identity of the industrial worker. In The Dollmaker (1954) Harriette Arnow dramatises an important migration from the rural South to Detroit during World War II which exposes the ways in which American capitalism was able to diffuse a national working class identity. Chester Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and his experiences as an African American writer in the 1940s, highlight the intersections between race (and racism) and class in the United States. Hubert Selby, in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), undermines the hegemonic ideology of post-war consumerism by drawing attention to the poverty and violence in an urban working class community. All these writers share a common concern with continuing, and re-developing, the dynamic and heterogeneous tradition of American working class cultural production.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in History. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 295-311). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR29335

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The Celts, as a distinct and culturally-unified people, are a social construction as much as an historical reality, endowing Celtic antiquity with a certain availability of outline, and a certain scope. When the Celtic world began to be scrutinised in the eighteenth century, its borders could, therefore, be filled with concepts drawn from other antiquities. Classical antiquity, and particularly its Greek variety, was a vital coordinate in this navigation of the past. This thesis explores the history of these Graeco-Celtic negotiations. Using Reinhart Koselleck's theory of asymmetric counterconcepts, it calculates the precise angles of the relation between Greek and Celt in antiquarianism, comparative mythology and folklore, Classics and Celtic Studies, from the early eighteenth and to the late nineteenth centuries. The thesis then puts forward one particular writer as an original and unique interpreter of the tradition of Graeco-Celtic relations, the Irish playwright J.M. Synge. Through archival research, it demonstrates quite how deeply Synge was immersed in this scholarly tradition; in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, he followed a deliberate path of reading in antiquarianism, Classics, Celtic Studies, comparative linguistics, mythology and folklore. It then argues that Synge transformed such Graeco-Celtic scholarship into a formidable authorial strategy, in his prose account of his travels on the Aran Islands and his famous, controversial plays. By identifying this strategy, it reveals how Synge's work exploits the continued presence and power of antiquity. Most studies of the reception of Greek antiquity in Irish literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries assume a straightforward, inherent connection between Ireland and Greece. This thesis complicates that connection by identifying the powerful history of Graeco-Celtic relations and, particularly, its transformation at the hands of J.M. Synge. This will allow for scrutiny of what actually happens at the crux between Greece and Ireland in literary texts.

Most scholars agree that meaning and intelligibility are central to Heidegger’s account of Dasein and Being-in-the-world, but there is some confusion about the nature of this intelligibility. In his debate with McDowell, Dreyfus draws on phenomenologists like Heidegger to argue that there are two kinds of intelligibility: a basic, nonconceptual, practical intelligibility found in practical comportment and a conceptual, discursive intelligibility. I explore two possible ways that Dreyfus might ground this twofold account of intelligibility in Heidegger: first in the distinction between the hermeneutic and apophantic “as”, and second in the presence and absence of the as-structure. I argue that neither approach succeeds because practical intelligibility is always already discursive and discursive articulation is a condition of practical comportment.

Notwithstanding the disparity in their age, nationality and background, both Hubert Parry (1848–1918) and Max Reger (1873–1916) were subject to a common heritage of European musical art that informed and shaped their compositional development. This can be seen in its most striking form in their shared reverence for and debt to Johann Sebastian Bach. While there is a considerable volume of literature on Reger and Bach, Parry’s response to the Leipzig master is less widely known outside Britain. In drawing some parallels between the organ music of the two composers, focusing in particular on the chorale-based compositions, I shall show how the spirit of Bach infused Parry’s organ works in a similar way to Reger’s, relating this to issues of universality and nationalism. In the process I shall touch on Reger’s reception in Britain during the latter part of Parry’s life.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.