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John Fellows: A Minor American Deist
(1956) Stevens, George L.; Aldridge, Alfred O.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
Lafayette, America's Hero: The Growth of a Legend
(1963) Bloxom, Marguerite Doris; Beall, Otho T.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
The legend of Lafayette began to grow about the time of his 1784 goodwill visit to the United States. Identical biographical sketches of Lafayette appeared in several early histories of the Revolutionary War, and similar versions were included in other histories. The core of the sketch was the picture of a young French nobleman, inspired by the ideals of liberty and equality, who came to America at great personal sacrifice and his own expense to take part in the fight for freedom. His story was used to add weight to the rightness of the action of the American patriots, and to stimulate feelings of national pride. After the turn of the century, the story of Lafayette became shorter and more routine. It was dropped from some textbooks, and was greatly abbreviated in others. It seems probable that while Lafayette would not have been forgotten, his place in American history would have been small, perhaps even obscure, if he had not visited America again in 1824. During this last visit, after an absence of forty years, the General received an enthusiastic and overwhelming reception. Interest in Lafayette revived quickly, and accounts of him appeared in newspapers, periodicals and separate books. The importance of his contribution to the foundation of the United States was emphasized; as a hero, he approached the position of America's savior. In addition, his personal characteristics endeared him to the people. In all probability, Americans' lasting esteem for Lafayette was developed as a result of the 1824 visit.
The Prophet and the Poet: The Relationship of Thomas Carlyle with Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hugh Clough
(1968) Gadziola, David Stanley; Brown, Samuel E.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
Thomas Carlyle attempted to put into practice both his theories of poetry and his ideas concerning Heroes and Hero Worship by seeking to influence several poets of his acquaintance to write poetry according to his order. Though he failed, he nevertheless left a significant mark on the poetry of Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Arthur Hugh Clough.
A Translation of Richard Morison's Apomaxis Calumniarum
(1968) Eakin, Mary H.; Zeeveld, W. Gordon; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
The thesis includes a foreword and a translation from the Latin of the Apomaxis Calumniarum, a book written by Richard Morison, apologist for Henry VIII, hired by his secretary, Thomas Cromwell. The work was composed as a rebuttal to an attack by the German theologian Johann Coclaeus, and contains a defense of Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and of the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher, and an attack upon the papacy. Morison maintains and supports by Biblical testimony that the divorce merely righted a wrong, as Henry's union with Catherine had been incestuous. He claims that More and Fisher were respectively sick and old, and were seeking the glory of martyrdom, but both were deserving of an ignominious death for the horrendous crime of obstinately upholding the power of the pope in England. He charges that the papacy had a spurious origin, and that throughout history popes have had a harmful effect. A large part of Morison's book consists of a personal attack on Coclaeus.
The Influence of Jacob Bryant on William Blake
(1969) Svatik, Stephen Jr.; Howard, John; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)
To understand William Blake's complex mythology, one must understand the sources of his theories. A primary source of mythic material in the eighteenth century was the research and writings of the antiquarians, principally of Jacob Bryant. Blake shared with the antiquarians a desire to understand the origins of man and of the development of man's political and religious institutions. But while the mythographers concentrated on giving simply a temporal account of the development of man and society, Blake expanded on their accounts of history by analyzing the importance of inner man in the development of his social institutions. In A New System, Jacob Bryant discusses three points of mutual interest for Blake. First, he dismisses Greek mythology for having corrupted the truth concerning man's past. Second, he attributes the degeneration of religion to man's error of materialism. And third, he discusses the fragmentation of society and man's subsequent fall from an earlier period of unity, freedom, and peace. Blake's writings contain concepts similar to those of Bryant, but Blake modified and refined them to fit into his unique mythological structure. Blake's most significant departure from Bryant is his paralleling of man's social and political conflicts with man's failure to maintain an equilibrium of his inner essences in his establishing a ratio between the inner man and the outer world. Blake's mythopoeic imagination surpasses those of Bryant and the antiquarians in meaning and significance when he goes on to forsee man's return to unity, to a Golden Age of freedom and peace.
Jane Austen: The Moral Imperative
(1976) Carter, Barbara Sue; Myers, Robert Manson; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
According to Edward Austen-Leigh and subsequent critical tradition, Jane Austen urged no system of morality save the inferiority of low to high principles. While she propounds no religious doctrine, the six novels reveal, if not a complete code of behavior, a moral imperative, a direction one should take to come to successful terms with life. First, one must face reality. Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, has to learn that Gothic fantasies are neither the stuff of life nor a reliable guide to it. More importantly, she must perceive the motives and feelings of others. Reality, once understood, must be accepted. The tasks of the present must be accomplished; its pleasures, however limited, must be enjoyed, because to squander time in regret for the past or anticipation of the future is to court misery. Sense and Sensibility extends the definition of this duty to include care for the material and emotional welfare of one's family. By failing to provide for his stepmother and sisters, John Dashwood contrasts unfavorably with Sir John Middleton and Colonel Brandon. The difference between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood is not merely between sense and sensibility, but between care for the feelings of others and selfish absorption in one's own troubles. Elinor's sense largely derives from her wish to spare increase of her suffering by spreading its effects . Marianne must nearly die before she comes to a like commitment to practical compassion. In Pride and Prejudice, confrontation of reality and the claims of family are united in a statement of the need for self-knowledge in order to represent our selves accurately to the world and thereby enhance the family's claim to gentility. Elizabeth and Darcy realize they have created erroneous first impressions and must labor to erase these, while Lydia's elopement renews our awareness that what one does individually affects the whole family's position. Mansfield Park elaborates on this theme by arguing for sound judgment in the rearing of children to behave responsibly according to the dictates of society. Although one's station does influence character, there is a better guide available to all: conscience. Mary Crawford, appealing though she is, lacks moral fibre, while Fanny Price, however diffident, delivers accurate judgments because conscience guides her formation of them. In Emma, this eighteenth-century construct of conscience and rationality called right reason is brought to bear on the question of the obligations the privileged have to those less well-circumstanced. Emma must realize that the caste system exists to preserve order, not to gratify conceit. Mr. Knightley emerges as the ideal upper class gentleman: responsible, wise, compassionate. Persuasion shows Sir Walter Elliot as a moral bankrupt, preening himself on lineage and estate instead of laboring to justify the possession of them. He has wasted his substance and dissipated the force of his character to gratify vanity. His daughter Anne has extracted from a bleak existence whatever joy she could find in being useful to others. Her marriage to Captain Wentworth is less a reward for her past endurance than a happy exception to her uncomplaining acceptance of a barren life. Throughout, she has been supported by a belief that in breaking the original engagement she did right in yielding to the persuasion of her older friend Lady Russell, despite her conviction that the advice itself was wrong. The book thus urges clear-sighted evaluation of the real world and its inhabitants, assumption of responsibility for family and dependents, and obedience to the codes needed for social stability.
When Vernal Suns Forbear To Roll: Belief and Unbelief, Doubt and Resolution in the Poetry of Philip Freneau
(1977) Griffith, Joseph Jeffrey; Vitzthum, R.C.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
This study analyzes and evaluates the pre-1790 lyric poetry of Philip Freneau through close examination of representative poems. Freneau should be taken more seriously as an artist and thinker than he now is: the notions that Freneau was "dwarfed and transformed" or "thwarted" by his environment and that he "entirely congruent" to the literary and philosophic conventions of his day are contradicted by the poetry but have influenced the general critical estimate of the poet. Freneau was a careful poetic craftsman who not only sometimes reversed the poetic and philosophical conventions but also often used his poetry to examine his own philosophical relationship with the universe. The central issue for Freneau was not simply the essential transience of all life, as most critics have argued, but rather the lack of a phenomenological reality which could be reliably known. Thus Freneau was concerned with the development of a meaningful way to live in a world which he speculated might be void of meaning. The introduction reviews past and present critical assessments and summarizes the standard critical views--Pattee's, Clark's, Leary's, Adkins', Bowden's; explains the editorial difficulties in dealing with Freneau's works; and outlines the dissertation's purpose, method, and organization. The body of the study consists of an examination of key lyrics from the editions of 1786 and 1788 which reveal the themes and formal artistic techniques characteristic of Freneau's serious earlier poetry. Each poem is subjected to three kinds of study. First the central thematic concerns of each poem and the patterns of symbol and image with which the poet conveys them are examined. Second the formal structure of each poem, showing how Freneau's manipulation of rime, rhythm, and spatial organization either underscores or undercuts his meaning is considered. Third, the extensive revisions which Freneau made of these poems and their purpose and effect are analyzed. In each case, the first collected edition of the poem is used as the basis for discussion, following the chronology of the poem's publication as closely as possible. The study is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is the introduction; chapters two and three discuss the 1786 edition; chapters four and five the 1788 edition. Chapter six, the conclusion, recapitulates the major points made in the preceding chapters; briefly considers selected poems from the 1795, 1809, and 1815 editions; and assesses Freneau's achievement.
ANNUALS: A Collection of Poems
(1978) Mackey, John Joseph; Van Egmond, Peter; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
The poems in this collection were written during the past year and are arranged in roughly chronological order. My intention in writing the poems was to construct a truthful recreation of experience which would evoke corresponding feeling. By selecting and ordering details of ordinary occurrences, I hoped to create microcosmic situations. The use of literary, mythological, and biblical allusions aided me in this endeavor. These, like all poems, should be read aloud, for the sound of words was a prime consideration in their making. The beauty of poetry, I believe, lies in the expression itself, the art born of ordinary experience and chiseled by the tool of language. My attempt was to create something pleasurable and universal from the raw material of experience. Having begun writing Shakespearean sonnets as a challenge, I soon found that the strict meter and rhyme scheme were excellent aids in producing a poem from a germinal idea. Hence, more than a few that follow are in this mode.
John Payne Collier and the Shakespeare Society
(1980) Wagonheim, Sylvia Stoler; Schoenbaum, Samuel; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
During the early years of the nineteenth century, the heightened interest in manuscripts and early printed editions precipitated the growth of publishing and printing societies which subsequently flourished throughout the 1800's. The object of these societies was generally to preserve through reproduction--and distribution to a select few--rare literary documents. One of the first societies to limit its scholarly scope to William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but to open its resources to a far-flung literary community, was the Shakespeare Society founded in 1840 through the efforts of several eminent Victorian editors, most prominently John Payne Collier. Throughout its eleven years of active existence (1841-52), the Society produced forty-eight full-length scholarly studies and four volumes of Papers including the first accurate biography of Inigo Jones, the first printed edition of Sir Thomas More (three pages of which are thought by many to be in the hand of Shakespeare), the first publications of the full cycle of the Coventry mystery plays and the Chester Whitsun cycle, and the reprints of several Shakespearean source plays including Timon. Moreover, the Society represents a dramatic advance in conscientious investigative scholarship over the limited and exclusive social book clubs of the early part of the century and, for this reason alone, deserves attention and recognition. The aim of this study is to explore the origin of the Shakespeare Society and to document its contributions to the continuum of Shakespearean and Elizabethan scholarship. The first chapter charts the cultural currents from which the Society originated. The focus here is primarily on the unrestrained bibliomania of the period and on the steadily increasing desire of the English middle class to read, see, and understand the work of their national poet. Chapter two serves a dual purpose. It recalls previous Shakespeare associations in order to illustrate the advances in structure and scholarly objective demonstrated by the Shakespeare Society of 1840, and it examines the financial troubles which plagued the Society throughout its existence and contributed to its demise. Subsequent chapters recall and assess in the light of modern scholarship the individual dramatic and nondramatic achievements of the Society. They examine the Society's attempts to apply historical methods to the study of Shakespeare's non-dramatic literary milieu, and they record the disheartening evidence of systematic and premeditated fraud perpetrated by John Payne Collier on the scholarly community--often through the pages of the Society's publications. Chapters five and six highlight the Society's editorial achievements in dramatic literature: its ground-breaking editions of early English drama, its critical attention to the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and its painstaking researches into the life and work of Shakespeare himself. Chapter seven reviews the four-volume sequence of The Shakespeare Society's Papers, which fostered cooperative literary scholarship through short contributions from amateur as well as professional scholars. The final segment represents an attempt to characterize, through the use of manuscript as well as published sources, the gentlemen of the Society's Councils. This study concludes on a bitter-sweet note since the questions of authenticity directed to the scholarship of John Payne Collier not only damaged his reputation, but also cast suspicion on all of his scholarly activities. On the other hand, Collier's industry in forming and maintaining the Shakespeare Society is unquestionably laudable. Through his efforts, the Society gathered together the most knowledgeable men of the period in the first cooperative attempt to encourage the systematic dissemination and exchange of literary information and to apply methods of historical research to Elizabethan literary scholarship.
Harold Frederic: His Fictive Imagination and the Intellectual Milieu
(1980) Clark, Jean Marshall; Thorberg, Raymond; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
Harold Frederic reflects in his novels and stories the intellectual milieu of the latter nineteenth century. Most of the major philosophic concerns of the age are present in one way or another in his fiction: metaphysical idealism, Comtian positivism, Darwinism, the Higher Criticism, pragmatism, and, as the power of reason-indeed reason itself-came more and more into distrust, a voluntarism deriving from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. While Frederic tended to synthesize ideas rather than to develop his own systematic philosophy, the psychological penetration of his characters evidences his awareness of such concerns. He is a careful craftsman in the drawing of his fictional personalities, and he often makes explicit note of the inclusion of intellectual elements in their delineations. Frederic's atypical writing possibly reflects his atypical lack of artistic isolation. His continued journalistic activity as well as his membership in various literary and political clubs might account for his remaining highly responsive to contemporary politics, economics, and religion. His fictional canon reads like a small compendium of the thought of the century's closing decades, tracing its broad diverse movements and interrelated philosophic strands. His early writing was vitalized by the new currents of thought generated by sociologists and economists in revolt against the social Darwinists, and by new approaches instituted by the Bible exegetes. Included among these were the views most compatible with his own liberalism and his optimistic attitude toward life. Later such hopes as they inspired found themselves weighed in the dramatic balance of his fiction against an unvanquished Darwinism, a spreading skepticism, as well as the darker visions of voluntarism. His final work, while yet bearing witness to an open, inquiring mind, shows a receptiveness to the blending of the spiritual and scientific conceived by American pragmatism. Frederic's writing, according to Walter Taylor, "anticipates the mingled realism, naturalism, and disillusion of the twentieth century." It is to employ a wrong set of terms, however, to assess him, as Charles Child Walcutt does, as "a kind of naturalist manqué," making implicit comparison thereby with, say, Crane or Dreiser. More to the point is the statement by Austin Briggs that "in the works of no other American novelist does one so fully sense what it was like to be alive in those turbulent years."
Philip Freneau's Wildflower: An Analysis of the "Amanda" Poems
(1981) Lovelock, Frank A.; Vitzthum, Richard C.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
According to Philip Freneau's biographers, an early disillusionment appears to have resulted from Freneau's first experiences at sea as well as from an abortive love affair that began on the island of Bermuda in 1778. Freneau left behind scores of poems which detail his years in the Caribbean, seven of which, after much revision, he grouped together in 1809 and linked directly to his experiences in Bermuda. And although it can be shown that Freneau, incorporated diverse biographical material into these poems, the resulting fiction demonstrates that the poet was able to transcend his own unhappiness through literary art. These seven poems, subsequently labelled the "Amanda" poems in honor of the woman they seem to celebrate, have been ignored by Freneau's critics, who often regard them as little more than conventional love verses. The present study challenges this assumption and attempts to demonstrate that the creation of the "Amanda" story was of central importance to Freneau. The research has included a linear comparison of the known variants of the "Amanda" poems and has found that although the series comprises only seven poems in its final format, it holds major clues to unlocking the mysterious forces which shaped Freneau's intellectual, emotional, and artistic maturity. The study examines not only the poems in the "Amanda" series but also many other poems with structural or thematic ties to the series. Since Freneau's experience in the West Indies is the most pervasive motif in his work, "Amanda" surfaces in numerous poems, and her image becomes a vehicle through which the poet tests a sequence of metaphysical abstractions. To Freneau, she first comes to represent unattainable beauty, then disappointment, and finally resignation. As such, the myth of "Amanda" is arguably more important to Freneau than her real-life model. Whoever she was, "Amanda" profoundly affected the poet, his philosophy, and his art; and her influence on him has been overlooked far too long.
Psyche's Descent into the Underworld: The Transcending Pattern in Myth and Literature
(1982) Orme-Johnson, Rhoda Frances; Lawson, Lewis A.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
The myth of Cupid and Psyche first appears in the Latin novel of Apuleius entitled the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass. Its wide influence may be due, in part, to the archetypal significance and power of the myth, especially of its central event, Psyche's katabasis or descent into the underworld. Apuleius can be credited with creating both the tale and the unique novel that frames it, as well as explicitly connecting the two parts into one carefully integrated whole. Chapters I through IV of this study examine Apuleius' synthesis of his philosophical, literary, and folk-tale sources into one novel with this Neoplatonic myth at its core. The myth is seen to function as the keystone and symbolic heart of the work. Psyche's descent into the underworld, her subsequent reunion with her divine husband, her apotheosis, and the birth of her daughter Bliss set the pattern for the spiritual quest of Lucius, the novel's hero. Parallel to Psyche's descent and return are Lucius' seaside vision of the goddess Isis and his subsequent spiritual rebirth. Parallel to Psyche's elevation to Mt. Olympus and attainment of immortal status are Lucius' initiations into the Isiac mysteries with their promise of long life and eternal bliss in the Elysian Fields. Psyche's katabasis is clearly a metaphor for the soul's descent inwards to a source of power that confers knowledge and immortality. The wide influence of the Psyche myth throughout Western literature may thus be due to its most universal spiritual meaning. The second part of this study begins with an analysis of the spiritual descent and rebirth pattern in myth, ritual, and psychology. Based on psychophysiological research on the Transcendental Meditation technique a model of a "transcending" pattern is proposed for understanding these events as they occur in imaginative literature. The transcending model contains three stages: 1) a naturally increasing quiescence of mind and physiology, which is expressed metaphorically as a dive or descent; 2) a noetic and ineffable experience of the inner self, which may be suggested by images of an unbounded and eternal sense of being; and 3) a blissful return to activity with a more integrated, holistic psyche. Six modern novels which consciously retell the Psyche narrative are then examined in the light of this transcending model. They are: Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, Odessa Strickland Payne's Psyche, Pierre Louys's Psyche, Jules Romains's Psyche trilogy, C. S. Lewis's Till Have Faces, and Francois des Ligneris's Psyche 58. The novels consistently appear to treat the katabasis event as a transcending to subtler levels of the inner self which is important to the spiritual development of the protagonist. In addition, Erich Neumann's analysis of the myth as an archetype for specifically feminine development is examined along with other views of the feminine quest. It is found that the literature of the feminine quest also conforms to and is illuminated by the transcending model. The study concludes by applying the transcending model to several modern novels not consciously related to the Psyche tradition. The model is found to be useful in understanding the metaphoric dives and descents of each protagonist, the basic structure of the narrative, and even of the creative process itself. Thus the transcending model proves to be a powerful technique for analyzing the form and content of literature as well as its effects upon the reader.
Hemingway vs. Hemingway: Femininity and Masculinity in the Major Works
(1986) O'Sullivan, Sylvia G.; Hovey, Richard B.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
As the most famous American writer of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway inspired not only a generation of writers but a generation of critics. Within this matrix of composition and commentary, the Hemingway myth developed, with generous help from the author himself. This myth fostered a masculine ideal which eschewed women, courted death and danger, and depicted man as alone and as a loner in a hostile universe. This myth is now undergoing a re-evaluation. As part of that re-evaluation, this study examines the confluence of femininity and masculinity in Hemingway’s fiction by arguing that, contrary to popular belief, the masculine and feminine worlds are not as antithetical to Hemingway as many had previously supposed. In Chapter One, I discuss the importance of women in the short stories and argue that Hemingway was empathetic toward and desirous of the feminine world. In Chapter Two, I examine love and friendship as portrayed in The Sun Also Rises, and offer a new and positive reading of this novel. With regard to A Farewell to Arms, I explore the possibility of romantic love as it exists between two sexual equals. Turning from romantic love to domestic bliss, I argue in Chapter Four that To Have and Have Not is Hemingway’s feminist manifesto. Chapter Five traces Robert Jordan's abandonment of the macho ideal for a more personal, less code-oriented ethos in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In my final chapter, I argue that Hemingway's public and private selves correlate with his hypermasculine and submerged feminine selves as demonstrated in Across the River and Into the Trees and The Garden of Eden, respectively.
Women's Search for Identity in Modern Fiction (1881-1927): Self-Definition in Crisis
(1987) Grant, Wilda Leslie; Panichas, George A.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
A study of eight women in the novels of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf reveals the validity of the statement of Henry James that "the novel is history." Each of the eight characters reflects the position of women at a specific point in the history of the modern world. The situations in which the eight women find themselves demonstrate the unique ability of each author to develop a character who parallels conditions that existed for women in the period in which the author wrote. Conventions governing the place and expectations of women changed radically toward the end of the nineteenth century. Modern English fiction dramatically recorded theses changes over time in the evolution of the female character as it was developed in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and in The Golden Bowl (1904) by Henry James, in Nostromo (1904) and in Victory (1915) and in Women in Love (1921) by D.H. Lawrence, and in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and in To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf. James's Isabel Archer and Charlotte Stant, Conrad's Emilia Gould and Lena, Lawrence's Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay are endowed with charm, intelligence, courage, moral integrity, and patience. These virtues do not vary qualitatively as one generation leads to the next. What does vary, as the eight novels show, is the measure of free choice available to the women; and this measure is significantly connected to their places in historical time. The eight novels register the continuous process of women's search for self-definition. Viewed separately, the novels offer insightful character studies of eight women with remarkable emotional strength, whose actions respectively set the pace in the novels. Grouped as a unit, the novels in which these women appear present a poignant commentary on the status of women in the years between 1881 and 1927, years that included not only the havoc of the Great War, but also a growing reassessment of social and moral values.
White Flowers
(1989) Jayasundera, Ymitri; Plumly, Stanley; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
I think of the act of writing a poem as a ritual--the precise timing, the arrangement of the steps following one another until it becomes a whole, an eternal return of the way memory works. The poems are a means of walking--often blindly, hesitantly-into the self as into a cave, vast and complete, and the only light is the flashlight in my hand that shines into a dark corner barely letting me see the images that quickly disappear before the light. The darkness, defining, takes on a life of its own, so that the act of writing becomes listening to the silence within the self as if the past can only be retraced by hand. The central event in the speaker's life is the death of her father. This book is framed by his presence, as the poems in Part 11 are her attempt to hold the past in place.
Balancing the Centuries: The Literary Career of Margaret Deland
(1989) Betz, Phyllis M.; Bryer, Jackson; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
Margaret Deland was once a widely recognized and critically respected turn of the century American writer. Today, Deland is hardly recognized except in specialized studies of religious fiction. This study aims to reacquaint the modern reader and critic with Deland's diverse body of fiction and non-fiction. Deland's novels, stories, and essays are strongly rooted in the cultural and social issues of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Deland felt the novelist's role as social observer and commentator was vitally important to a fiction' s composition and effect, and she consciously incorporated a clear moral vision and program into her work that sought to balance modern and traditional beliefs and behaviors. Particularly through the stories of Old Chester and Dr. Lavendar, her best known creations, Deland illustrated how this balance could be achieved and its impact felt in an individual's private and social relationships. The development of Deland's moral view will be a major component of this study. Also important to this study is the process of Deland' s rise and fall from public and critical view. The personal and public factors that contributed to Deland's sudden appearance on the literary scene, her developing appropriation of notice and acclaim, her eventual disappearance from public memory will be discussed. To accomplish this, extensive examination of Deland's fiction , non-fiction, and correspondence will be included. Finally, this study will apply various critical viewpoints to her works, especially feminist literary theories, to illustrate Deland's continuing value, not only as a cultural representative, but as a literary voice.
The Fragmented Vision of Claude McKay: A Study of His Works
(1989) Griffin, Barbara Jackson; Bryer, Jackson; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, played a significant role in the development of Black American literature. His search for a Black aesthetic and his poems of defiance gave inspiration to young Black artists hungry to explore new ideas. Their creative spirit flowered into the Harlem Renaissance. But, McKay, whose themes helped to stimulate this movement, was plagued by the very concepts that helped to define it. Throughout his life, he was ambivalent about three things: his Afrocentric universe, his role as rebel spokesman, and his relationship to Jamaica. Already a poet of some consequence in Jamaica, McKay thought of America as a grander arena for his voice, but when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in 1912, he was shaken by the intense racism of America. His upbringing in rural Clarendon Hills had not prepared him for what he witnessed. By nature, a proud man, McKay turned his lyrical expression into an instrument that would change the arrogance of the Whites. "Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation" (1917) implied the nobility of African roots and affirmed the superiority of primitivistic value system over Western cultural standards. But in McKay's psyche lay the germ of ambivalence that rejected the code of any "world" not sanctioned by the West. During the years following World War I, when relations between Whites and Blacks were strained, McKay became a rebel spokesman for the masses with his defiant poem "If We Must Die" (1919). It urged oppressed people to stand valiant in the face of defeat. But McKay later denied that the poem spoke for Blacks and further questioned the artistic worth of his other "militant" poems. McKay was also ambivalent about his homeland. Throughout most of his life, he ignored in his writing the political, social, and economic realities of Jamaica and evoked instead the image of an Edenic island that offered him refuge from the complexities of the twentieth century.
Betrayal and Moral Imagination: A Study of Joseph Conrad's Five Major Works
(1990) Wang, Chull; Freedman, Morris; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
A series of Joseph Conrad's five major novels, beginning with Lord Jim (1900), followed by Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), and concluding with Victory (1915), are all concerned with the theme of betrayal. These novels demonstrate Conrad's artistic depth and ultimately provide a better way of understanding his profound "moral imagination." The "standing jump" Conrad made out of Poland certainly motivated him to speculate diligently and almost exhaustively about the significance of the "jump" or betrayal. Conrad did not, however, remain in a personal realm. He transcended, as Russell Kirk said of T.S. Eliot, "the barriers of private experience" by shaping his unique experience into a universal art with the power of his moral imagination. His treatment of betrayal is too comprehensive, too artistic to be merely private or personal. The life of Conrad was a ceaseless and always agonizing struggle, as Eliot said of Shakespeare, "to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal." It is F.R. Leavis who first noted Conrad's "moral intensity" and thereby placed him in the "Great Tradition" of English literature, along with Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence. Conrad surely occupies his place in the "Great Tradition" not only as an "innovator in form and method" but also as an artist whose "moral intensity" stands out among English writers. Any study of Conrad should not ignore his passion for "the moral discovery" as well as his "spirit of love for mankind." The "moral discovery" was for Conrad "the object of every tale." It is certainly through such moral imagination that Conrad succeeds in, to borrow Lionel Trilling's phrase, "involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination." It is also through the redeeming and almost healing power of the moral imagination that Conrad's vision as a whole always resists becoming either wholly existential or merely nihilistic.
S.S. John W. Brown, Baltimore's Living Liberty
(Project Liberty Ship, 1991) Cooper, Sherod
This work gives a brief history of the Liberty ship John W. Brown from its launch in 1942 through 1991. The ship's seagoing years were from 1942 to 1946 and then the ship served as a maritime high school in New York City from 1946 to 1982. Project Liberty Ship acquired the John W. Brown in 1983. Since 1991, she has been an operational museum ship moored in Baltimore, Maryland.
Beckett, Giacometti, and the Geometry of Being
(1991) Cornish, Sue Karen; Freedman, Morris; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)

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