Because Ernest Hemingway's four major novels are often referred to as tragedies, these novels are checked against Aristotle's criteria for tragedy. "The Sun Also Rises" is not an Aristotelian tragedy because the wounding of Jake Barnes precedes the events in the novel; it is, instead, an extended tragic epilogue. "A Farewell to Arms" is a modern anti-romantic tragedy of irony, a story of disillusionment which does not provide cathartic relief. The most nearly tragic in structure, "The Old Man and the Sea" does not provide a catharsis because Hemingway fails to arouse the necessary emotions. The most tragic of the four in effect, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" lacks the proper structure for tragedy, but is a tragic epical novel. Although all four of these books have elements of the Aristotelian tragedy, all are other types of tragedy.

This dissertation discusses the complicated relationship (known as the comitatus) of kings and followers as presented in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. The anonymous poets of the age celebrated the ideals of their culture but consistently portrayed the real behavior of the characters within their works. Other studies have examined the ideals of the comitatus in general terms while referring to the poetry as a body of work, or they have discussed them in particular terms while referring to one or two poems in detail. This study is both broader and deeper in scope than are the earlier works. In a number of poems I have identified the heroic ideals and examined the poetic treatment of those ideals. In order to establish the necessary background, Chapter I reviews the historical sources, such as Tacitus, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the work of modern historians. Chapter II discusses such attributes of the king as wisdom, courage, and generosity. Chapter III examines the role of aristocratic women within the society. Chapter IV describes the proper behavior of followers, primarily their loyalty in return for treasures earlier bestowed. Chapter V discusses perversions and failures of the ideal. The dissertation concludes that, contrary …

A search for self through historical reconstruction constitutes a crucial concern of the American postmodern historical novels of Pynchon, Barth, Mailer, Coover, and Doctorow. This concern consists of a self-conscious dramatization, paralleled by contemporary theorists' arguments, of the constructedness of history and individual subject. A historian-character's process of historical inquiry and narrative-making foregrounded in these novels represents the efforts by the postmodern self to (re)construct identity (or identities) in a constructing context of discourse and ideology.

This study demonstrates, through the detailed examination of a specific example of written Old English, that a very large proportion of the general vocabulary of Old English survives in some form in Late Modern English. The "Finnsburg Fragment" is parsed and translated and its lexicon glossed. After a brief discussion of several special semantic categories and the traditional categories of semantic change, the study enlarges upon the historical setting which influenced the loss, retention, shift, or stability of these two hundred Old English words. Appendices group the lexicon by parts of speech as well as by semantic history.

In this study, I show that three major areas of Mark Twain's personality—conscience, ego, and nonconformist instincts—are represented, in part, respectively by three of his literary creations: Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and No. 44. The origins of Twain's personality which possibly gave rise to his troubled conscience, need for attention, and rebellious spirit are examined. Also, Huck as Twain's social and personal conscience is explored, and similarities between Twain's and Tom's complex egos are demonstrated. No. 44 is featured as symbolic of Twain's iconoclastic, misanthropic, and solipsistic instincts, and the influence of Twain's later personal misfortunes on his creation of No. 44 is explored. In conclusion, I demonstrate the importance of Twain's creative escape and mediating ego in the coping of his personality with reality.

Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley has posed interpretative difficulties for readers since its 1847 debut. Critics, editors, and artists contemporary with Tennyson as well as in this century have puzzled over the poem's stance on the issue of the so-called Woman Question. Treating Tennyson as the first reader of the poem yields an understanding of the title character, Princess Ida, as an ambassador of Tennyson's optimistic and evolutionary views of human development and links his work to that of visionary educators of nineteenth-century England. Later artists, however, produced adaptations of the poem that twisted its hopefulness into satirical commentary, reduced its complexities to ease the task of reading, and put it to work in various causes, many ranged against the improvement of women's condition. In particular, a series of editions carried The Princess into various nations, classrooms, and homes, promoting interpretations that often obscure Tennyson's cautious optimism.

The dissertation is a collection of eighteen short stories. These stories relate the life experiences of the first-person narrator and chronicle a period of twenty years. They are arranged in five thematic groups: Expectations, Questions, Lighter Moments, Answers, and Separation. The focus of each one represents the narrator's experiences with his father, as the narrator attempts to understand a man who exerts such control over his life. Expectations contains three stories, with the first depicting the narrator's earliest association with his father. The other two represent significant growth experiences. The five stories in the Questions portion focus on the youthful narrator as he tries to understand the reasons behind his father's values and moral lessons. In the section, Lighter Moments, there are four stories in which the narrator is in his late teens and recalls four incidents that lacked the usual serious undertones prevalent in most of his experiences with his father. Answers is composed of three stories in which the narrator, nearing manhood, struggles with feelings of disillusionment with the life his father has planned for him, as well as the realization that his father controls every aspect of his life. The final section of three stories, Separation, depicts …

This study corroborates theories that ordinary representation of narrative time as a linear series of "nows" hides the true constitution of time and that it is advantageous for us as readers and critics to consider alternatives to progressive reality and linear discourse in order to comprehend many of Ambrose Bierce's stories, for his discourse is fluid and metonymic and defies explication within traditional western language concepts. The Hebraic theory of intertextuality encourages limitless considerations in textual analysis since language is perceived as a creative and dynamic force, not merely mimetic. As such it offers a means for reconsideration of fundamental theories concerning the natures of language and time in Bierce's stories.

A modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Catherine and her foster brother, Heathcliff, from achieving normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. Insights from anthropology, psychology, and sociology provide a key to many of the subtleties of the novel by broadening our perspectives on the causes of incest, its manifestations, and its consequences. Anthropology links the incest taboo to primitive systems of totemism and rules of exogamy, under which the two lovers' marriage would have been disallowed because they are members of the same clan. Psychological studies provide insight into Heathcliff and Catherine's abnormal relationship—emotionally passionate but sexually dispassionate—and their even more bizarre behavior—sadistic, necrophilic, and vampiristic—all of which can be linked to incest. The psychological manifestations merge with the moral consequences in Bronte's inverted image of paradise; as in Milton's Paradise, incest is both a metaphor for evil and a symbol of pre-Lapsarian innocence. The psychological and moral consequences of incest in the first generation carry over into the second generation, resulting in a complex doubling of characters, names, situations, narration, and time sequences that is characteristic of the self-enclosed, circular nature of incest. An examination of Emily Bronte's …

The following three chapters identify influences of the Imagist movement and the avant garde painters on the early poetry of Williams, and particularly on those poems that deal with flowers. This study is restricted to the earlier poems for several reasons, the most obvious being that Williams simply does not employ floral imagery to any extent in The Collected Later Poems. For instance, of the almost three hundred poems in The Collected Earlier Poems nearly sixty take flowers as their title or rely on floral imagery for part of their power. Nearly half that many use arboreal imagery, another prominent and important "object" in Williams' poetry, and, of course, many more use other images from the natural world. On the other hand, in The Collected Later Poems only three poems have flowers in their titles. Even in these three Williams was more interested in depicting sociological situations than in description, for his conception of poetry changed radically after the 1930's. He became convinced at that time that poetry should be serious rather than entertaining. Further, he became a staunch advocate of the "anti-poetic" theory of beauty whose chief tenet was that beauty and ugliness were part of a single whole. …

This study analyzes the themes of victimization and self-sacrifice as they appear in the life and works of Oscar Wilde. "Victimization" is defined as an instance in which one character disregards, damages, or destroys another's well-being; "self-sacrifice" is an instance in which one character acts to his own detriment in order to help another or through dedication to a cause or belief. Chapter I discusses the way in which these concepts affected Wilde's personal life. Chapters II-VI discuss their inclusion in his romantic/decadent dramas, social comedies, various stories and tales, novel, and final poem; and Chapter VII concludes by demonstrating the overall tone of charitable morality that these two themes create in Wilde's work as a whole.

Eight short selections of fiction. "Inventions" consists of two invented creation myths. The three stories in "Dreams" are fantasy tales set in a common dream-world. The selections in "Imitations" are neither fantasy nor science fiction: "Time's Tapering Blade" is an experiment in form; "The Wake" concerns a group of friends dealing with a death; and "Janie, Hold the Light" is based on stories from the author's family about Christmas during the depression of the 1930's.

This study surveys pronominal reference marking in active and inverse languages. Active and inverse languages have in common that they distinguish two sets of reference marking, which are referred to as Actor and Undergoer. The choice of one series of marking over another is shown to be semantically and pragmatically determined.

The thesis examines isolation and caritas, or charity, in The Confidence-Man as polar themes which express, respectively, withdrawal from and suspicion of the human community and integration within and appreciation for that community. Isolation is considered a negative theme; caritas, an affirmative theme.

This critical introduction to the works of John Fowles focuses upon his three novels, with secondary attention to his poetry, essays, and The Aristos, his non-fiction book of personal philosophy. Giving some biographical detail, the first chapter treats the influence of other writers upon Fowles's work and discusses his thought--especially as it appears in The Aristos, the poems, and the essays. The second chapter is a study of The Magus, Fowles's first novel, although published second. The Aristos is especially important to an understanding of this consolidation of personal philosophy into a fictional structure; the two key influences upon The Magus are Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and Jungian psychology. The third chapter deals with The Collector, revealing much of Fowles's feeling about the artist in society and the imbalance of social justice that spawns ignorance and cruelty. The fourth chapter examines his most successful novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, unusual for its combination of thematic modernity with Victorian narrative style. The final chapter summarizes Fowles's leading place in contemporary fiction three months before publication of The Ebony Tower, his forthcoming collection including four short stories and one novella. Fowles's fiction has established him among the finest of today's artists in …

One rarely sees the names James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway together in the same sentence. Their obvious differences in writing styles, nationalities, and lifestyles prevent any automatic comparison from being made. But when one compares their early short story collections, Dubliners and In Our Time, many surprisingly similarities appear. Both are collections of short stories unified in some way, written by expatriates who knew each other in Paris. A mood of despair and hopelessness pervades the stories as the characters are trapped in the human condition. By examining the commonalities found in their methods of organization, handling of point of view, attitudes toward their subjects, stylistic techniques, and modes of writing, one is continually brought back to the differences between Joyce and Hemingway in each of these areas. For it is their differences that make these artists important; how each author chose to develop his craft gives him a significant place in literature.

This study presents an alternative approach to the novels of Franz Kafka through demonstrating that the Kafkan protagonist may be conceptualized in terms of mythic archetypes: the knight errant and the pharmakos. These complementary yet contending personalities animate the Kafkan victim-hero and account for his paradoxical nature. The widely varying fates of Karl Rossmann, Joseph K., and K. are foreshadowed and partially explained by their simultaneous kinship and uniqueness. The Kafka protagonist, like the hero of quest-romance, is engaged in a quest which symbolizes man's yearning to transcend sterile human existence.

This paper examines the metaphoric structures that underlie Chopin's major novel, The Awakening, as well as those underlying selected short stories. Drawing on the modern theory of metaphor described by Mark Turner, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, the author argues that conceptual metaphors are the structural elements that underlie our experiences, thoughts, and words, and that their presence is revealed through our everyday language. Since these conceptual structures are representative of human thought and language, they are also present in literary texts, and specifically in Chopin's texts. Conceptual metaphors and the linguistic forms that result from them are so basic a part of our thinking that we automatically construct our utterances by means of them. Accordingly, conceptual metaphor mirrors human thought processes, as demonstrated by the way we describe our experiences.

Sociolinguists working in Northern urban areas have shown that Hispanics who come in contact with African Americans sometimes acquire features of African American vernacular English (AAVE). However, the acquisition of AAVE features by Hispanics in the South has yet to be documented. Specifically, no one has studied the kind of English that Hispanics in Texas are acquiring. The present study investigates this issue through research in an inner-city area of Dallas: Oak Cliff. During the past twenty-five years, the population of Oak Cliff has changed from a largely African American community to include a substantial number of Hispanics. Though their neighborhoods remain fairly separate, sports and gangs provide an arena for extended contact. This study investigates the extent to which AAVE grammatical features are being acquired by bilingual Hispanic adolescents who hang out with African Americans. The analysis for this paper focuses on the relationship between contact and depth of acquisition of AAVE syntactic constraints on the use the copula (is/are, be). Preliminary results show that be+V+ing as an habitual form has been incorporated into the grammar of these subjects, suggesting fundamental changes towards an AAVE grammatical system.

Emerson frequently illustrates his philosophy with complementary scientific examples that clarify his ideas. This study examines Emerson's enumeration of the laws and powers of Intellect in conjunction with twentieth-century science, illustrating his ideas in the method he often employs. The physiological model of the two hemispheres of the brain parallels the two intelligences Emerson ascribes to man--understanding and reason. Hemispheric theories describe an analogue to the Emersonian epiphany-- hemispheric integration--and help to distinguish the epiphany from other experiences associated with altered states of consciousness. Quantum physics and relativity theory illustrate the vision of the unity of nature perceived during the epiphany. Using modern science to illustrate Emerson's ideas in this way makes us apprentice to a rhetorical technique used and advocated by him.

In Book IV of Paradise Regained, Satan tempts Christ by offering him the learning of the Greek philosophers, poets, and orators. Christ's response is a vehement denigration of Greek literature, which seems to contradict the praise of the classics found in Milton's prose works of the 1640s. Interpreting the condemnation of Greek learning in Paradise Regained as a modification of the poet's early attitudes, the present study examines the biographical, political, theological, and scientific factors which influenced Milton's thought and altered his opinions on the value of classical literature.

A poet who is a woman and a theologian writes under three pressures, or a triple bind: individuality, spirituality, and society. The desires and drives of the ego and those of spirituality often conflict, and societal expectations which gender bestows add further stress to the poet's efforts. This constant struggle destroys some poets (Plath, Sexton) and renders silent many of the rest. The following collection of poems combats the silence in four progressive sections: The first is an introductory essay which further discusses the triple bind; the second, "Between Two," illustrates spiritual relationships from despair to disillusionment; the third section, "Life in the Mirror," describes deteriorating human relationships; the final section, "Salt," presents problems resolving to a kind of negative capability. This poetry collection continues one woman's poetic struggle toward validity and acceptance.

The teaching of freshman composition can be a challenging and exciting endeavor if teachers are aware of current linguistic facts about the nature of language variations manifested by their students and the linguistic shortcomings of many textbooks. Awareness of the distinction of linguistic competence and linguistic performance can aid teachers in making freshman composition more realistic to students. These concepts are technically explained in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky (1965), and are applied to dialect for teachers of composition by the Committee on CCCC Language Statement in Students' Right to Their Own Language (1974). With knowledge of linguistic principles, teachers can respond to their students' dialects humanistically and realistically and can teach academic English without making impressionistic and incorrect statements about non-academic variations from their students.

Initially, this work recognizes that college students often fail to understand or to appreciate the language of literature; therefore, a proposal has been developed that incorporates the typical methods and media of two academic areas--literature and oral interpretation--into a synchronized dual approach to the study of literature. Chapter I discusses contemporary problems of literacy in general; Chapter II explores the traditional teaching approaches of English and oral interpretation; and Chapter III develops a possible-literary communal effort by outlining a survey course in British Literature and presenting a series of exemplificative Writers Theatre scripts.Chapter IV reviews the associative problems that apparently exist between oral language and the written symbol and recommends that a companion project might demonstrate more fully the efficacy of an integrative approach to the teaching of writing.