English Theses and Dissertations
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Item 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.Item 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.Item 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."Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.