Wuthering Heights is a composite of opposites. Its two houses, its two families, its two generations, its two planes of existence are held in place by Emily Bronte's careful manipulation of repetitive, yet differentiated, symbols associated with each of these pairs. Using symbols to develop her polarities and to unify them along the imaginatively rendered horizontal axis connecting Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the vertical axis connecting the novel's several "heavens" and "hells," and the third dimensional axis connecting the spiritual and corporeal worlds, Emily Bronte gives the divided world of Wuthering Heights an almost perfect symmetry. This study divides the more than seven hundred symbols into physical and nonphysical. The physical symbols are subdivided into setting, animal life, plant life, people, celestial objects, and miscellaneous objects. The fewer nonphysical symbols are grouped under movement, light, time, emotions, concepts, and miscellaneous terms. Verticality and thresholds, the two most important symbolic motifs, are drawn from both physical and nonphysical symbols.

This dissertation traces imperialist ideology as it functions in the texts of two radical Liberal critics of imperialism, Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster. In chapters two and three respectively, I read Woolf's autobiographical account Growing and his novel The Village in the Jungle to examine connections between "nonfictional" and "fictional" writing on colonialism. The autobiography's fictive texture compromises its claims to facticity and throws into relief the problematic nature of notions of truth and fact in colonialist epistemology and discursive systems.

This creative thesis collects five fictional stories, as well as a critical preface entitled “Fractals and the Gestalt: the Hybridization of Genre.” The critical preface discusses genre as a literary element and explores techniques for effective genre hybridization. The stories range from psychological fiction to science fiction and fantasy fiction. Each story also employs elements from other genres as well. These stories collectively explore the concept of the other and themes of connection and ostracization.

American writers of narrative fiction frequently manipulate the words of their narrators in order to convey a significance of which the author and the reader are aware but the narrator is not. By causing the narrator to reveal information unwittingly, the author develops covert themes that are antithetical to those espoused by the narrator. Particularly subject to such subversion is the first-person narrator whose "I" is not to be interpreted as the voice of the author. This study examines how and why the first-person narrator is subverted in four works of twentieth-century American fiction: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to , and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus

The prevailing analyses of the structure of the Gospel of Mark represent modifications of the form-critical approach and reflect its tendency to regard the Gospel not as a unified narrative but as an anthology of sayings and acts of Jesus which were selected and more or less adapted to reflect the early Church's theological understanding of Christ. However, a narrative-critical reading of the Gospel reveals that the opening proclamation, the Transfiguration, and the concluding proclamation provide a definite framework for a close pattern of recurring words, repeated questions, interpolated narrative, and inter locking parallels which unfold the basic theme of the Gospel: the person and work of Christ.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the concept of a godless universe governed by a consciousless and conscienceless Immanent Will in Hardy's poetry is an ineluctable outcome, given the expanded scientific knowledge of the nineteenth century, of the pantheistic views of the English Romantic poets. The purpose is accomplished by tracing characteristically Romantic attitudes through the representative poetry of the early Victorian period and in Hardy's poetry. The first chapter is a brief introduction. Chapter II surveys major Romantic themes, illustrating them in Wordsworth's poetry. Chapter III treats the decline of the Romantic vision in the poetry of Tennyson and Arnold. Hardy's views and the Victorian poets' influence are the subject of Chapter IV. Chapter V demonstrates Wordsworth's influence on Hardy in several areas.

This study analyzes the development of the major characters in Fowles's novel - Charles, Sarah, and Sam - in terms of the heroic quest motif. Using the basic pattern of the heroic quest, the monomyth, that Joseph Campbell sets forth in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I attempt to show that Fowles's novel may best be understood as the story of three separate heroic quests whose paths cross rather than as the story of a single hero or heroine. This reading seems to account best for all elements of the novel and to explain best the final positions of the characters in question as well as providing a rich appreciation of the novel's wealth of imagery.

The central figure in The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, is shown in this thesis to pursue a narcissistic flight from existential reality. Following a review of contemporary criticism, Edna Pontellier's narcissism is discussed in connection with her sexuality and suicide. Sources cited range from biographies of Kate Chopin to scholarly articles to the works of modern psychologists. The emphasis throughout the thesis is on the wealth of interpretations that currently exist on The Awakening as well as the potential for further -study and interpretation in the future. Rather than viewing The Awakening as a purely feministic novel, it is stressed that The Awakening can transcend such categorization and be appreciated on many levels.

Undergraduate thesis psychoanalyzing the composer Don Carlo Gesualdo. It focuses on the relationship between the composer and mastery of the musical task. The author examines the life and work of Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, who was commonly referred to as both musician and murderer.