The purpose of this investigation is to determine the change in characterization that takes place in the works of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Source material include the writings of such critics of Spanish literature as Richard Chandler, Kessel Schwartz, Emiliano Díez-Echarri, José M. Roca Franquesa, Federico C. Saínz de Robles, and José A. Balseiro. Emilia Pardo Bazán wrote a total of twenty novels. From this collection ten were selected which best exemplify the change in characterization in her writings.

It will be the purpose of this thesis to comment upon the eight novels by Marta Brunet. The novels will be examined in detail, giving special consideration to her emphasis on fatalism and destiny, and will examine critical opinion of her work and draw conclusions as to the author's place in the modern Latin American novel.

Gordon Haight, in his biographical preface to the letters of George Eliot, states the "without her intimate knowledge of the Evangelical mind George Eliot would have lacked part of the experience on which her wide sympathy was founded." This thesis is an exploration of, a commentary on, Haight's remark.

The Second Gulf War (1990-1991) brought about huge transformations in the relationships between the Western and Arab world. The invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and deployment of American-led Western troops in Saudi Arabia brought the Arab world to the top of the Western agenda. The presence of mostly non-Muslim Western troops in Saudi Arabia, which is home to the holy sites of Islamic people, triggered mixed reactions among Arab people and polarised their relationships with the West. These developments left a huge impact on literature and the shaping of the imagery of the Other in fiction. This thesis began as an attempt to study the impact of the Second Gulf War on the depiction the Image of the Other. The research rests on conducting an analysis of how the West-Arab encounters are being perceived in Anglo-American and Arabic fiction (1991-2001). The study considers six fictional works from the Anglo-American world: Friends, Lovers, Enemies (1991) by Barbara Victor, Innocent Blood (1997) by Christopher Dickey, I Know Many Songs But I Cannot Sing (1996) by Brian Kiteley, Hideous Kinky (1992) by Esther Freud, Virgins of Paradise (1993) by Barbara Wood, and Falling for the Sheikh by Carole Grace (2001). The study also focuses on six works from the Arab world: Bahãa Ţãhir’s (Ңubb fi-l-manfã) Love in Exile (1995), Ibrãhīm Ãḥmad’s (Ţufl al-CNN) The CNN Child (1996), Yūsuf al-‘Īlah’s (Ghazal al-dhãkirah) The Memory Spinning (2000), Ãḥmad Ibrãhîm Al-Faqīh’s (al-Thulãthiya) Gardens of the Night (1995), and Ңanãn al-Shaykh’s (Innahã London Yã ‘Azīzī) Only in London (2001) and Bahãa al-Dīn al-Ţawd’s (al-Ba‘īdūn) Those Who Are Far Away. These writers have been studied in the belief that they demonstrate the shaping of the East-West encounters. Writers from both cultures place their cultural concerns within a national framework that they constantly negotiate. Nevertheless, the thesis challenge is to pinpoint the complex web of factors that characterised each culture. Hence, this study seeks to contribute in showing how these writers are engaged in the process of reconstructing, adjusting and even transcending the stereotypes of their cultures.

In recent years the study of Samuel Beckett's work has moved into increasingly specialised and archival areas. With the sheer wealth of work undertaken since the field began in the1960s and the availability of previously unobtainable materials this was somewhat of an inevitability. The sub-field of “Beckett and Philosophy”, into which this thesis most comfortably falls, has become so saturated with differing approaches that one might be forgiven for thinking new work which examines the core ideas guiding Beckett's writing redundant. One of the key contentions of this thesis is that owing to the resistance Beckett's novels offer to critical discourse, the task of understanding and explaining them is never complete. Based on this belief, I have attempted a new survey of the evolving place philosophy occupies within Beckett's novels, seeking not to discount approaches such as the archival work already mentioned, but to incorporate them into the fundamental question of what these books mean. Rather than relying upon only one theoretical approach, I attempt to draw from a variety of philosophical and literary sources, in a process free enough to work with the developmental refining of Beckett's novels throughout the years. In the first chapters on his early books, <em>Murphy</em> and <em>Watt</em>, I argue they engage in a process of bricolage, bringing out their own philosophical perspectives in an illustrative manner. The middle section of the thesis looks at the four 1946 novellas and the first work of The Trilogy, <em>Molloy</em>, as representative of a shift in Beckett's writing toward modes that employ form and content symbiotically in order to respond actively to metaphysical possibilities. In the last two chapters on <em>Malone Dies</em> and <em>The Unnamable</em> I examine the process of reduction that leads Beckett to focus largely on form, and the consequences this may have for the achievements of previous work.

This thesis explores journeys of faith and survival in three Jewish graphic novels: A Contract with God by Will Eisner, The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar, and We Are On Our Own by Miriam Katin. In each of these texts, the protagonists struggle with their faith and relationship with God, as they negotiate challenges as Jews living in largely unreceptive spaces. Along their journeys, the protagonists confront God in their own ways to try to make sense of the role that faith and Judaism plays in their lives. Drawing on basic principles of the relationship between Jew and God, as well as terms and concepts concerning the aesthetic construction of comics, this thesis probes into the nature of these journeys and the impact they have on the protagonists' physical and spiritual survival.

For us to appreciate Austen's work it needs to be altered. We are only comfortable with it if it mirrors our expectations of it; the picturesque English countryside, elegant males and beautiful women in period clothing, living in impressive stone mansions. We want stories of strong, feminist ladies, who throw the men into raptures with their beauty and their ability to engage in passionate, snappy verbal exchanges. We want the held-back emotions, the intimacy of the near touch, the relief of liberating, emotionally charged confessions of admiration and love. The purpose of this essay is to examine two of Jane Austen's popular novels Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility with their respective latest film adaptations. When Jane Austen is interpreted in modern film her point-of-view is altered into our own. These changes celebrate, not Austen’s social writing, but our modern idea of romance. The themes in her novels are themes that are timeless and they are themes which our modern lives are filled with as well.

JACK CLEMO: CARTOGRAPHER OF GRACE is an interpretative study of the novels and poetry of Jack Clemo. Chapter One traces, through published biographical material, the main personal influences upon the development of his vision. Chapters Two to Four show how ideas which first found publication in his published poetry only after 1951 had developed over a period of twenty years. The material for these chapters (mainly unpublished novels and juvenile poetry) was kindly loaned to the author by Mr Clemo. The published novels and first collection of verses are studied in the four following chapters, where it becomes clear that Clemo's initial, distinctive Calvinist view of life shows striking similarities with the neo-orthodox writings of Karl Earth (whom he had not then read) and the post-Barthian Jurgen Moltmann (whom Clemo has never read). These chapters offer an interpretation of Clemo's Calvinist vision and show it to be both theologically sound and, in terms of literature, unique. Clemo's contribution, it is seen, is in terms of his metaphoric use of landscape in a sustained refutation of the case for a natural theology; this, and his personal adaptation of the idea of election inspired by his admiration for Robert Browning. Substantial changes of poetic technique appear in the collection Cactus on Carmel, and these, and their sources, are accounted for in Chapter Nine. Chapters Ten to Twelve trace the development of Clemo's poetry away from its pre-occupation with the landscape of South- East Cornwall, the expansion of genre to include portraiture and dramatic monologue, and account for these developments in terms of Clemo's life-long determination to marry. This determination is seen to be the most important influence upon Clemo's life, shaping all the work he has produced. Chapter Thirteen examines the poetry in which Clemo challenges head on the materialism of the century. The final chapter is a detailed study of the worksheets of poems Clemo wrote over some twenty five years, and thus compares the processes of production adopted after the poet became blind with those employed earlier.

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This thesis explores journeys of faith and survival in three Jewish graphic novels: A Contract with God by Will Eisner, The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar, and We Are On Our Own by Miriam Katin. In each of these texts, the protagonists struggle with their faith and relationship with God, as they negotiate challenges as Jews living in largely unreceptive spaces. Along their journeys, the protagonists confront God in their own ways to try to make sense of the role that faith and Judaism plays in their lives. Drawing on basic principles of the relationship between Jew and God, as well as terms and concepts concerning the aesthetic construction of comics, this thesis probes into the nature of these journeys and the impact they have on the protagonists' physical and spiritual survival.