In order to establish the views on suffering held by the nineteenth-century (1821-1881) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it is first necessary to determine the viewpoint of his age. In general, it was an age of humanitarianism-- the age of "compassion for the suffering of human beings," the age of optimism, of faith in a morality established by science and reason." Humanitarianism itself was an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century intellectual movement which emphasized reason. This age of reason reflected the progress in science, which had weakened the hold of the Church and of faith on men's minds. Dostoyevsky's rejection of socialism made it necessary for him to reject the corollary of socialism: the elimination of human suffering. Thus he was forced to evolve a personal interpretation for the suffering that he would not let be abolished. Critics generally consider Siberia to be the turning point in Dostoyevsky's life, both from a personal and a literary standpoint. Before his imprisonment, Dostoyevskyts values were too immature for him to develop a significant theory illuminating the problem of suffering. It took Siberia to teach Dostoyevsky the meaning of metaphysical suffering-- the search for the meaning of God and reality. This …

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the politics of Byron as they are related to his age. Necessarily, a part of this work will deal with ideas that are somewhat conjectural, largely because of the limitations of time and space as well as the lack of accurate information--particularly that which concerns Byron and the Whig circle.

The thesis of this paper on John O'Hara is that certain of his novels contain sufficient characteristics of literary naturalism to reward a study of them from that perspective. In part, the purpose of this paper is to illustrate O'Hara's merits and, hopefully, to enhance his reputation as a writer of literary worth by viewing his novels from the proper perspective.

The purpose of this thesis is to point out explicitly the rather startling fact that each of these three writers in a novel which is representative of his own art and world view had developed the hunt-quest theme in a pattern and manner which are almost identical.

This paper is a study of the differences in orthography which are found in contrasting late seventeenth-century written English with that of today.