Although it is generally acknowledged that Puritanism has been a major influence in Canadian society, little has been done to trace that influence in the literature. It is the aim of this thesis to discuss the place of Puritanism within some of the best Canadian prairie fiction. The broadly historical approach is avoided in order to make possible a detailed study of a few significant novels. Five novelists were .chosen for consideration: Arthur Stringer, Robert J. C. Stead, Martha Ostenso, Frederick Philip Grove, and Sinclair Ross. Three novels by Arthur Stringer, The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child, are included because together they form one complete work, and three by Frederick Philip Grove, Settlers of the Marsh, Our Daily Bread, and Fruits of the Earth, because of his relatively large output of significant fiction. Only one novel by each of the other novelists is discussed: Robert J. C. Stead's Grain, Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese, and Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House. The selection of the novelists was governed by a desire to examine only fiction worthy of critical examination and yet to represent as many attitudes towards Puritanism as possible. Arthur Stringer, the least important in terms of artistic achievement, is included because of his attempt to replace Puritanism with the American myth of innocence. Robert J. C. Stead and Martha Ostenso represent, respectively, the extremes of acceptance and rejection. Frederick Philip Grove, a more complicated figure, accepts many of the Puritan values, but points to the breakdown of those values' in the society. Sinclair Ross presents the most comprehensive and articulate description of Puritanism. Although he is critical of it, and, like Grove, sees the weakening of its hold on the society, he is nevertheless able to maintain a positive attitude towards it. The Introduction states the need for a comparative and thematic approach to Canadian literature and suggests some of the pre-suppositions of this study. In order that the main emphasis be placed on the literature, the definition of Puritanism is given within the discussion of the specific works under consideration. Canadian Puritanism is obviously not the same as the original Puritanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but neither is it simply the rigid and narrow-minded morality which represents the worst form of its later historical development. It is best approached with an awareness of both its original form and its later perversions. The five main chapters are devoted to separate studies of the five novelists. The emphasis is placed on the attitudes towards Puritanism reflected in the novels. For each novel, the major themes are examined, a discussion of symbolism and imagery is included whenever possible, and comparisons with the other novels are made where relevant. The Conclusion draws more specific comparisons and defines more fully the three themes common to all the novels: the problem of man's relationship with the soil, the problem of woman, and the problem of authority. The land, like the Puritan God, is the arbitrary master, controlling the seasons and the outcome of the crops, and demanding obedience and co-operation of man. The rigorous nature of farm life and the need for children encourages the Puritan attitude that the proper role of woman is that of a hard working wife and mother father than that of an intellectual or sexual companion. Because the farm is an independent and self-sufficient unit, the main authority figure is the father, and because the work is so time-consuming the father often becomes, to his family, as aloof and arbitrary as the Puritan God. Prairie Puritanism may appear inordinately harsh, but the harshness is the result of the Puritan's awareness of sin which, forces him to face his situation realistically. Any realization of love and forgiveness, when it comes, is achieved after all the facts have been faced and the temptation to romanticize has been resisted. With the movement away from the land and the gradual improvement in working conditions, the characteristic themes and settings of prairie life, and with them, the explicit Puritan doctrines may disappear, but it is to be hoped that the tough-minded and realistic approach to life which is basic to Puritanism, will not be lost. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Frederick Buechner is an American novelist, born in 1926, who, since 1950, has created eight novels and five works of nonfiction. Although his work has been reviewed and admired by prestigious critics, no lengthy study has yet appeared. Yet the merit of Buechner's work deserves wider critical attention. This study does not attempt to deal comprehensively with Buechner's twenty-five year span of creativity. Instead it presents a consideration of what has been Buechner's most consistent concern throughout his work: his attempt to justify the ways of God to contemporary man. This study is unique in that much of it is based upon a personal conversation with the author rather than on secondary sources. On March 15, 1976, a personal interview was granted with Mr. Buechner in Hobe Sound, Florida. It was a rare opportunity to question an author about his works and his life, especially since this interview occurred simultaneously with the writing of this paper. In addition to the personal interview, Buechner's nonfictional works were used to illuminate his fictional themes. The religious dimension is present in Buechner's works from the beginning, even before he had formally studied theology. Although Buechner is still a relatively young novelist who will no doubt add to his present achievements, he is already unique among modern novelists in that he does not hesitate to deal with religious concepts as literal truths.

Thomas Hardy described himself as "churchy". Yet his later novels and poetry gave him the reputation of being an agnostic, an atheist and a heathen. He denied that there was any particular philosophy behind his work claiming that it was the result of impressions not convictions. However, I wish to show that Hardy's fiction and poetry expose specific religious beliefs and doubts, that gave rise to his notoriously pessimistic art. By investigating the themes of sin, atonement and salvation, as reflected in the Mosaic Law and the New Testament against Hardy's mature novels, and examining Hardy's concept of God in his poetry, I aim to show that Hardy rejected the miraculous and the doctrine of redemption but retained a belief in the Biblical premiss that the earth is cursed and that humanity is governed by the Biblical Laws which dictate the consequences of sin. Hardy depicts a universe in which humankind is cursed from birth, resides on a cursed earth and is denied the possibility of salvation or redemption. Hardy's profoundly pessimistic world view is a result of his inability to accept the Christian doctrines that offer man a means to rise above the curse of original sin. The characters and plots he created in his fiction were born out of doubt and despair. Consequently, his imaginative universe is permeated with doom and damnation. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

No description available.

Thomas Hardy described himself as "churchy". Yet his later novels and poetry gave him the reputation of being an agnostic, an atheist and a heathen. He denied that there was any particular philosophy behind his work claiming that it was the result of impressions not convictions. However, I wish to show that Hardy's fiction and poetry expose specific religious beliefs and doubts, that gave rise to his notoriously pessimistic art. By investigating the themes of sin, atonement and salvation, as reflected in the Mosaic Law and the New Testament against Hardy's mature novels, and examining Hardy's concept of God in his poetry, I aim to show that Hardy rejected the miraculous and the doctrine of redemption but retained a belief in the Biblical premiss that the earth is cursed and that humanity is governed by the Biblical Laws which dictate the consequences of sin. Hardy depicts a universe in which humankind is cursed from birth, resides on a cursed earth and is denied the possibility of salvation or redemption. Hardy's profoundly pessimistic world view is a result of his inability to accept the Christian doctrines that offer man a means to rise above the curse of original sin. The characters and plots he created in his fiction were born out of doubt and despair. Consequently, his imaginative universe is permeated with doom and damnation. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Turkish humanist, literary historian, novelist, essayist and poet Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's work (23 June 1901 - 24 January 1962) provides us with a unique opportunity to reframe the major questions of contemporary literary historiography, particularly those relating to the politics of literature and the history of religion. This dissertation surveys Tanpinar's writings in a variety of genres (fiction, poetry, literary history and theory) with a particular attention on his masterpiece, namely the novel /The Time Regulation Institute/. It demonstrates how Tanpinar's humanistic sensitivities, together with his dedication to social scientific scrutiny, results in a quest for an original, cross-disciplinary position for the critic, or at least an alternative "mood" in writing and representing. Alternatively, his is a quest for a new "method" for literature, literary criticism and cultural study. Among his company in this quest are nineteenth century Ottoman-Turkish revolutionaries, poets and novelists - such as the nationalist Namik Kemal, pious Ziya Pasha, populist Ahmet Midhat Efendi and suicidal Besir Fuad, to name some of the figures I discuss in this dissertation - alongside French symbolists, Paul Valéry in particular, but also philosophers such as Henri Bergson and even Martin Heidegger, alongside eminent sociologists August Comte and Emile Durkheim. Yet one would only do injustice to Tanpinar's thinking and writing unless one takes into consideration his reception of modernist writing at large, against the background of Melville's, T. S. Eliot's or Kafka's works; or his literary- historical and political position in contrast to Erich Auerbach's or Maurice Blanchot's. Tanpinar's account of the late Ottoman intellectual legacy and modern Turkish and European letters is most instructive today in understanding the social and political relevance of modern literary activity and its position vis-à-vis religion, particularly in the non-West. Accordingly he must also be read against the background of sociology of religion and art. Tanpinar's original "mode" of writing or "method" redraws the contours of the global expansion (or "globalization") of a particular "regime" of sensibility -- a particular way of seeing and saying, making and sharing, writing and reading -- i.e. an "aesthetic" regime, as Jacques Rancière has it. Tanpinar's elaborations on the social, cultural, theological and philosophical implications of this expansion -- particularly in the Ottoman world and later the Turkish republic, but also in what he calls the "Muslim Orient" at large -- leads to the discovery of certain zones of indistinction or ambivalence ("duplicitous" spaces, as Tanpinar has it) not only between religion and literature, but also between literature and social sciences. This enables him to "critique" social scientific writing literarily, i.e. through specifically literary writing in the novel The Time Regulation Institute. But he also critiques literary and philosophical writing with social scientific scrutiny not only in The Time Regulation Institute but also in his theoretical writings and his history, in his essays and his Nineteenth Century Turkish Literature. He thereby postulates a concept for the political history of literature on a global scale that in turn scrutinizes the relationship between writing beyond genres and religion. Tanpinar the literary historian was hired in the late 1930s to establish Turkish philology at Istanbul University, together with Auerbach who was hired to establish Romance philology at the same institution. Auerbach, whose literary historiography displays a similar attention to the history and politics of representation in the Judeo-Christian tradition, wrote his most influential works during his Istanbul exile. Given Tanpinar's alternative focus on the question of verbal arts and representation in the "Muslim Orient," reading Tanpinar and Auerbach together produces a more complete picture of the stakes of a world literature in this dissertation. Finally, to address the relevance of Tanpinar's writings to contemporary scholarship with clarity, this dissertation recontextualizes Tanpinar's thinking and his unvoiced disagreements with Auerbach, among others, against the background of the productive tension between Jacques Rancière -- "the humanist" of the dissertation who often traces back his literary thinking to Auerbach -- and Pierre Bourdieu -- "the social scientist" here whose thought is very much imbedded in the sociological tradition extending from Comte to Durkheim.

In "Heterodox Drama: Theater in Post-Reformation London," I argue that the specific working practices of the theater industry generated a body of drama that combines the varied materials of post-Reformation culture in hybrid fantasies that helped audiences emotionally negotiate and productively re-imagine early modern English religious life. These practices include: the widespread recycling of stock figures, scenarios, and bits of dialogue to capitalize on current dramatic trends; the collaboration of playwrights and actors from different religious backgrounds within theater companies; and the confessionally diverse composition of theater audiences. By drawing together a heterodox conglomeration of Londoners in a discursively capacious cultural space, the theaters created a public. While the public sphere that emerges from early modern theater culture helped audience members process religious material in politically significant ways, it did so not primarily through rational-critical thought but rather through the faculties of affect and imagination. The theater was a place where the early modern English could creatively reconfigure existing confessional identity categories, and emotionally experiment with the rich ideological contradictions of post-Reformation life.

This dissertation examines the role of religious experience in British modernist literature, arguing that a strain of modernist writing drew from different religious traditions to conceptualize and model ways of escaping the confines of the self. In distinctive yet strikingly similar ways, these writers draw from these traditions—orthodox and heterodox, eastern and western—not in an attempt to propound traditional theological ideas but to recapture a religious sensibility that extends beyond dogma or creed: a sensibility that can offer means of getting beyond the self’s limited, solipsistic, and myopic perspective. In response to the perceived decline of religion in late 19th- and early 20th-century British culture; the atomizing effects of industrial modernity; and a growing distrust, informed by contemporary psychology, of the limitations of the self and the self’s perspective, the works this dissertation examines achieve a frame of reference beyond the individual point of view through processes and practices I group under the term “unselfing.” Unselfing emerges in these works as a moral and broadly religious imperative, necessary to achieving authentic communion between people and, paradoxically, to achieving a more authentic relationship to the self; at the same time, these works represent unselfing as an endeavor that is necessarily asymptotic, difficult, and always incomplete. They model unselfing in and through literary form, not only conveying but also embodying processes of unselfing in their formal experimentation. Reading works by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, and T.S. Eliot alongside contemporary psychological, philosophical, and anthropological writings of the period, I show how a pervasive and urgent desire to use spiritual practices to escape the self shaped the development of British modernist literature. Modernist Unselfing thus challenges prevailing accounts of British modernism, according to which secular artistic innovation absorbed and attained the sacred value formerly located in religion. I argue that, on the contrary, these narrow accounts of secularization and aestheticization have obscured what much of modernist experimentation was actively attempting to capture: a desire, often ethically-minded, to forego self.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 176-184).