<p>This study examines L.P. Hartley's male protagonists who provide the focus for his major fiction. The male characters' difficulties in understanding themselves, and the world which confronts them, are issues discussed by the few serious critics of Hartley's work. The book-length criticism, however, has tended to rely heavily upon figures like Freud and Jung, and upon Romantic and Judaeo-Christian thinking and symbolism, in order to establish its views. My study constitutes an attempt to avoid the overt application of "schools" to Hartley's work, although like Hartley himself I cannot claim to have been completely untainted, for example, by our Freudian climate. Specifically, I am interested in demonstrating the complex processes by which Hartley's sensitive male protagonists near self-understanding, and how Hartley uses detailed, even intricate, symbolism to express those developments.</p> <p>Using the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, I thoroughly examine Eustace Cherrington's growth toward self-understanding in order to demonstrate the special problems confronted by a typical Hartleian male. Leo Colston, in The Go-Between, and Stephen Leadbitter, in The Hireling, are then included in the discussion, and the three males' associations with fantasy worlds, and with manipulative women, are seen to contribute to the difficulties faced by these protagonists. In a final chapter, by examining the earlier fiction in the light of some of Hartley's less symbolic later novels, in particular The Harness Room, I indicate how Hartley's symbolism has been used, in the past, to conceal his interest in male homosexual relationships.</p> <p>Hartley, in addressing the issue of self-knowledge in his fiction, also makes a statement concerning the difficulty faced by the individual who, after the Second World War, was especially confronted with the task of securing an identity for himself in an increasingly egalitarian, fast-paced "modern" world. Hartley's canon is a metaphoric expression of how what Hartley terms the "Great Man" of Victorian fiction becomes the weak, victimised, but in many ways "greater" twentieth century man; for all his insecurity and failure, the Hartleian male of the 1970's is one who has painfully explored both himself and his environment in an attempt to survive, and to establish for himself, however temporarily, a "unique personality" appropriate to his time.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)