The music of Benjamin Britten is both inspiring and intriguing: inspiring, because his music can move the listener; intriguing, because his use of triadic harmonies and rhythmic settings seems at once free, flexible, and spontaneous yet sensible and appropriate in representing the mood of the text. Although many of Britten’s harmonies are traditional in nature, e.g. major and minor triads, it is difficult, almost impossible or cumbersome at best, to assign Roman numerals to his harmonies because his manner of chord progression does not always conform to functional theory. In my analyses, I will demonstrate that the logic behind Britten's harmonic progressions can be explained through two types of neo-Riemannian transformation theories, namely Richard Cohn's Four Hexatonic Systems and Leonhard Euler's Tonnetz. In the case of the "Spinning Scene" from The Rape of Lucretia, Hindemith’s "Table of Chord-Groups" will be used to explain the presence of harmonies that are not part of the four hexatonic systems. Throughout, Schenkerian graphs will be presented to illustrate how the underlying structure and overall harmonic design of each piece work in conjunction with the emotion of the text. In addition, I will show that his rhythmic manipulations, when coupled with the meaning behind his chord progression, vividly paint the emotion of the text, as well as the state of mind of the poet or the character in an opera.

This dissertation begins from the problem that is built into realism as a literary genre: its commitment to capturing the unfiltered circumstances of human life will always be at odds with the artifice of its representational constructs and its fiction. In this study, I consider visuality as a central, productive part of this problem and seek intensely visual moments within realist novels where realism wages its own struggle with itself as it attempts to navigate its limitations and push forward its possibilities. These moments pause the narrative as they prioritize picture over action. As descriptive moments work to render visual images through words on the printed page, they are fraught with realism’s struggle to use the artifice of fiction as a means for approximating an ostensible reality. Facing this difficulty, realist practitioners take up vastly different strategies. In this project, I investigate why and how visuality is deployed so differently by those who chose to write in this mode. I seek that which is piercing in the nineteenth-century realist novel by locating moments of crisis and tension, both within the plot and also within the strategies of the stories’ delivery. These are moments where the novel becomes troubled by the visual, revealing the potential and limit of the image. In realism, visuality encompasses a broad and varied array of strategies, including instances of enargeia and ekphrasis, passages that seek to evoke a sense of place or milieu through a rich catalog of visual detail, expressive self-renderings in the dialog and inner monologs of the characters, explorations of the embodied act of seeing, and moments where perception fails or visual description exposes itself as insufficient. I consider a small group of canonical authors: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, who are of critical importance to this genre and to nineteenth century realism, as it moves towards modernism. By examining moments in their novels where descriptive imagery is at its most acute, I seek to explain how moments of intense visuality are crucial nodes where each author, using unique and distinctive methods, negotiates the problem of realist representation.

This thesis is about Thomas Hardy's presentation of marriage and divorce in his last novel Jude the Obscure. It presents how Hardy as a representative of his time reflected important ideologies such as marriage, free union, and divorce.

Poets such as Thomas Hardy, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy portray prostitutes who seem guiltless about their choice of profession. Hardy's Amelia seems to symbolize the mutation of a pure country girl into a soiled disciple of evil; yet in the poem the changes in her life brought on by prostitution are evident in her drastically changed physical appearance and mannerism. Webster's Eulalie is an intelligent and well-spoken woman who undermines the stereotypical generalizations about prostitutes, relocating the source of the Great Social Evil from her profession to the institutionalized educational failure that trains women for nothing better than housekeeping. Levy's unnamed Magdalen, disease ridden and dying, may resemble a fallen woman. However, her lack of regret over the out-of-wedlock relationship with a man would make her an unrepentant prostitute in the eyes of the Victorians and she openly points to the real unmentionable of Victorian prostitution—the male client.

This dissertation follows a collection of agentive objects around and through the networks of humans and nonhumans in four disparate works of English literature: the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, William Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders, and Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. Applying the emergent discourses of object-oriented analyses, I posit the need for a critique that considers literary objects not as textual versions of real-world objects but as constructs of human imagination. What happens when we treat nonhuman or inanimate objects in literature as full characters in their own right? What work do nonhumans do to generate the story and the characters? How does our understanding of the human characters depend on the nonhuman ones? Most importantly, what motivates the agency of the fictive nonhuman? I argue that in this particular collection of texts, nonhuman agency stems from authorial nostalgia for the Garden of Eden: a time long past in which humans, nonhumans, and God existed in perfect harmony. Each text preserves this collective memory in a unique way, processing the myth as the author's cultural moment allows. The Dream of the Rood chapter uncovers the complex network of mirrors between the poet, the fictive Dreamer, the True Cross who speaks to the Dreamer, and the reader(s) of the poem. I use Jacques Lacan's stages of psychosexual development to trace the contours of this network, and I demonstrate how the poet's Edenic vision takes the form of an early medieval feast hall in heaven in which God presides over a banquet table like Hrothgar over Heorot. The Rape of Lucrece chapter posits that a series of domestic actors (weasels, wind, door locks) join with various "pricks" in the poem in an attempt to protect Lucrece from her rapist, Tarquin. Through these objects, I investigate the limits of women's speech and its efficacy before concluding with a consideration of the poem's Edenic vision, a Humanist paradise-on-earth, in the guise of the Roman Republic. The next chapter follows a shorn section of hair through The Woodlanders as it performs various functions and is assigned responsibility and power by several different human characters in the novel. The hair acts within a network of "man-traps" that illustrate the dangers of human artifice in an industrial era, and it reveals to readers Hardy's certainty that we will never reclaim Eden in our postlapsarian world. Finally, I navigate the fantastic worlds of His Dark Materials with the aid of three powerfully agentive objects: a golden compass, a subtle knife, and an amber spyglass. The first and second, I insist, resist not only their user's intentions but also their author's, because they are imbued with so much life and power that the narrative cannot contain them. The spyglass, by contrast, performs exactly as it was designed to do, and reveals the secret of the perfectly symbiotic world of the creatures called mulefa, who model for us a very contemporary new Eden that is populated by hybrids, sustained by materialism and sensuality, and presided over by earthly individuals rather than an omniscient Creator. Pullman's trilogy brings us back to the Garden but insists that our fallen state is our triumph rather than our tragedy.

It is proposed in this investigation that the phenomenon of shock is central to the fiction of Mary E. Mann as a premier factor at the heart of its powers of creative constitution. The study highlights Mann’s writing as a system of jolts, fits, and shocks lacking intrinsic meaning. The lack of intrinsic meaning in events is not viewed negatively as a mode of loss, existential meaning not having been posited beforehand as standard for measuring the nature of feelings, acts, or lives. The tendency for shocks to lack meaning in Mann’s writing is not seen as nihilistic. Shock in Mann’s writing needs to be elucidated without a prior meaning-frame or nihilistic loss-of-meaning agenda. The study presents the case that Mann’s fiction is devoted to the business of exhibiting the potential horror of human life in a non-metaphysical, non-theoretic way. In Mann’s literary texts lives fall apart without justification or forewarning. Characters walk straight into darkness and pain—but no loss or gain of metaphysical meaning is to be inferred. Disaster does not mean that life is intrinsically disastrous. Nor does catastrophe imply that we live in a universe where meaning is inevitably withheld. When meaning is given or withheld it happens to be given or withheld. This accidentalness is itself shocking. Like happiness, disaster is non-essential. It is to a large extent ruled by chance. Unlike Thomas Hardy, with whom she is sometimes compared, Mary Mann is accordingly not a pessimistic writer who tends to want to let darkness have the final word in order to immerse the reader in a metaphysics of gloom. In her short stories and novels darkness often has the last word; yet that tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of reality. Negativity is real but extrinsic and non-essential. In Mann’s tales of Norfolk destinies, lives and characters fail simply because times are sometimes hard, and because adversity is central to fiction and existence.

This thesis proposes to demonstrate the representation of women in the 19th-century fiction through an analysis of the characters in George Eliot&rsquo / s Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy&rsquo / s The Return of the Native and Tess of the D&rsquo / Urbervilles. The study starts with an outline of the intellectual and industrial transformations shaping women&rsquo / s position in the 19th century in addition to the already existing prejudices about men&rsquo / s and women&rsquo / s roles in the society. The decision of marriage and its consequences are placed earlier in these novels, which helps to lay bare the women&rsquo / s predicaments and the authors&rsquo / treatment of the female characters better. Therefore, because of marriage&rsquo / s centrality to the novels as a theme, the analysis focuses on the female subordination with its educational, vocational and social extensions, the women&rsquo / s expectations from marriage, their disappointments, and their differing responses respectively. Finally, the analogous and different aspects of the attitudes of the two writers are discussed as regards their portrayal of the characters and the endings they create for the women in their novels.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-69).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-69). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Haifa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references and index.