In act I, scene 2 of Shakespeare's Hamlet, one of the key themes presented is the theme of order versus disorder. Gertrude's hasty marriage to Claudius and their lack of grief over the recent death of King Hamlet violate Hamlet's sense of order and are the cause of Hamlet's anger and despair in 1.2. Rather than contrast Hamlet with his uncle and mother, Olivier constructs an Oedipal relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude--unsupported by the text--that undermine's the characterization of Hamlet as a man of order. In contrast, Tony Richardson presents Claudius' and Gertrude's actions as a violation of the order in which Hamlet believes.

Written in the tradition of the classic spy novels of Ian Fleming and the detective novels of Raymond Chandler, The Agolmirth Conspiracy represents the return to the thriller of its traditional elements of romanticism, humanism, fast-moving action, and taut suspense, and a move away from its cynicism and dehumanization as currently practiced by authors such as John Le Carre' and Tom Clancy. Stanford Torrance, an ex-cop raised on "old-fashioned" notions of uncompromising good and naked evil and largely ignorant of computer systems and high-tech ordinance, finds himself lost in a "modern" world of shadowy operatives, hidden agendas, and numerous double-crosses. He is nevertheless able to triumph over that world when he puts his own honor, his own dignity, and his very life on the line, proving to himself and to his adversaries that such things can still make things easier to see amid today's swirling moral fog.

This thesis examines Angus Wilson's novels with particular attention to No Laughing Matter, 1967. The introductory overview of Wilson's first five novels and the examination of No Laughing Matter show that all Wilson's novels are concerned with his protagonists' capacity for self-deception and the ways deception limits freedom of choice. In No Laughing Matter six protagonists try to balance self-deception and freedom both in their lives and in the art forms which interest them. The thesis traces the lives of these six as they fail both as artists and as people. Chapter III of the thesis studies the relationship of fantasy to character in the novel. In No Laughing Matter particularly, the characters reflect the loss of liberty when individuals do not exercise their freedom to choose.

A collection of poetry.

The purpose of this paper is to determine why Mrs. Radcliffe's gothic novels were popular with contemporary readers. Sources include reviews from eighteenth century periodicals, essays of early nineteenth century critics such as William Hazlitt and studies of her work by twentieth century critics. The thesis is organized in four chapters each of which discusses one aspect of her work which particularly pleased her contemporary reviewers and critics: her invention, her attitude toward superstition, her use of poetic justice, and her outlook on nature. These aspects of her work alone did not secure for her the popularity she enjoyed, but, when combined with her ability to create suspense, helped her become one of the most popular writers of her era.

This analysis of Keats's poem proffers evidence and arguments to support the contention that The Eve of St. Agnes presents allegorically the poet's speculations regarding the relationship between eros and agape, speculations which include a sharp criticism of Christianity and a model for a new, more "humanistic" system of salvation. The union of Madeline and Porphyro symbolizes the reconciliation of the two opposing types of love in an apocalyptic marriage styled on the Biblical union of Christ and the Church. The irony inherent in the poem arises from Keats's use of Christian myths, symbols, and sacraments to accomplish this purpose.

This study explores continuities in thought between Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson by comparing their respective views on spiritual awakening. Their parallel ideas are discussed as results of similar perceptual dispositions which lead both to view awakening as an inner metamorphosis that leaves man less self-centered and more capable of a universal perception and appreciation of spiritual unity and beauty. Emphasized are parallels in Edwards's and Emerson's concepts of God, their views on the nature of awakening, their versions of preparation, and their thoughts about virtue and the awakened man. These continuities are also discussed as ideas that compose an underlying unity in American thought which unites the seemingly contradictory heritages of Puritanism and transcendentalism.

The investigation concerns a 1982 suit brought by Texas novelist Benjamin Capps and his publishers against the author and publisher of an historical novel, Sacajawea, alleging that the book contained approximately 145 instances of copyright infringement. Parallel-column exhibits of passages from the novel by Anna Lee Waldo and from Capps's writings illustrate the evidence submitted in court. The publishing history of the novel, brought out by Avon Books, is related, as well as the story of readers' discoveries of suspicious material and the ultimate litigation. A comparison is made of the original novel and a revised edition published in 1984. Using the Sacajawea case as a reference point, the study considers the state of ethics in the contemporary literary world.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Mists of Avalon is different from the usual episodic versions of the Arthurian legend in that it has the structural unity that the label "novel" implies. The narrative is set in fifth-century Britain, a time of religious conflict between Christianity and the native religions of Britain, especially the Mother Goddess cult. Bradley pulls elements from the Arthurian legend and fits them into this context of religious struggle for influence. She draws interesting family relationships which are closely tied to Avalon, the center of Goddess worship. The author also places the major events during Arthur's reign into the religious setting. The Grail's appearance at Camelot and the subsequent events led to the end of the religious struggle, for Christianity emerged victorious.

This study challenges Charles Lamb's 1811 essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation," which argues that Shakespeare's plays are better suited for reading than stage production. Each of the four chapters considers a specific argument Lamb raises against the theatre and the particular Shakespearean tragedy used to illustrate his point. The Hamlet chapter examines the supposed concessions involved in the actor/audience relationship. The Macbeth chapter challenges Lamb's Platonic view of Shakespearean characterization. The Othello chapter considers whether some characters and images, while acceptable to the reader's imagination, are improper on stage. Finally, the King Lear chapter considers the portrayal of the mind in the theatre, employing semiotic principles to examine the actor's expressive resources.

A part of Charles Dickens's genius with character is his deftness at creating an appropriate idiolect for each character. Through their discourse, characters reveal not only themselves, but also Dickens's comment on social features that shape their communication style. Three specific idiolects are discussed in this study. First, Dickens demonstrates the pressures that an occupation exerts on Alfred Jingle from Pickwick Papers. Second, Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times is robbed of his ability to communicate as Dickens highlights the errors of Utilitarianism. Finally, four characters from three novels demonstrate together the principle that social institutions can silence their defenseless constituents. Linguistic evaluation of speech habits illuminates Dickens's message that social structures can injure individuals. In addition, this study reveals the consistent and intuitive narrative art of Dickens.

This thesis examines the major works of two outstanding European poets, Lord Byron and Alexander Pushkin, with a view to estimating the extent of their literary and personal affinity. The study begins with a survey of biographical highlights which are relevant to the interpretation of the works of the two poets. Next, the thesis demonstrates that Byron's "Oriental Tales" and Pushkin's "Southern Poems," as well as their major works, play a prominent role in the comparison of their poetic characterizations. In the examination of style, attention is limited to Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, since they are regarded as the masterpieces of their respective authors. An appraisal of the continuing fame of both poets closes the study.

In examining Dostoevsky's treatment of faith in The Brothers Karamazov, critics often focus solely on "The Grand Inquisitor." Dostoevsky, however, refutes the Inquisitor's views through the movement of the three Karamazov brothers toward faith. The three Karamazov brothers, as a collective personality, represent the fundamental needs of man and the corresponding aspects of faith, each brother being an individual study of the necessity of integrating soul, heart and mind into faith. The crises that each brother faces force each one to develop a fuller dimension of faith. The final effect of integrating the soul, heart and mind in faith is active love.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the coexistence of time in Gabriel Garcfa Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude as a cause of the supernatural events, the hereditary memory, and the solitude and to examine the effects of this mythical time frame on character development, plot, narrative structure, and theme. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter introduces the parchments as creators of mythical time. The second, third, and fourth chapters investigate the effects of this unconventional time. Supernatural events, clairvoyance, and solitude are all examined as effects. The final chapter correlates the writing of the parchments with the writing of the novel and explains the effects of unconventional time on the reader. Thus, this thesis illustrates how the coexistence of time functions of two levels: the level of the parchments and the level of the novel.

Through narrations presenting juxtaposition of conditions and ambivalence of conclusions, writers in the Hawthornian tradition compel the reader to interpret for himself the destiny of the creative protagonist. In these works the creative self is often threatened with psychical annihilation by its internal conflicts between pragmatic needs and aesthetic goals, social responsibility and professional dedication, idealistic pursuits and materialistic desires. Works in this tradition show creativity evolving from conflicting forces within the creative self. Female characters in the novels function as the creative imagination, leading the self towards creative consummation, sometimes bearing the creation itself, and always suggesting mythical figures associated with creativity. Male characters represent either the withdrawn, sensitive, idealistic ego, or the active, materialistic will. Confrontation between these internal forces produces the apocalyptic revelation enabling the self to transcend its condition by renewing contact with the creative source, the unconscious psyche. For these writers the unconscious has roots in myth, legend, dreams, and memory and is opposed to sterile conditions producing fragmentation of the creative self. In the Hawthornian tradition, the American Revolution separated the self from existence in the timeless universal givens and propelled it into assuming the determination of history. Bereft of traditional guidance and belief …

Walker Percy differs from other American novelists in that he started writing fiction relatively late in life, after being trained as a physician and after considerable reading and writing in philosophy. Although critics have appreciated Percy's skills as a writer, they have seen Percy above all as a novelist of ideas, and, accordingly, the majority of critical articles and books about Percy has dealt with his themes, especially his philosophical themes, as well as with his philosophical sources. This study explores, therefore, the critical response to philosophical ideas in Percy's five novels to date, as evidenced first by reviews, then by the later articles and books. The critical response developed gradually as critics became aware of Percy's aims and pointed out his use of Christian existentialism and his attacks upon Cartesianism, Stoicism, and modern secular gnosticism. These critical evaluations of Percy's philosophical concerns have sometimes overshadowed interest in his more purely artistic concerns. However, the more a reader understands the underlying philosophical concepts that inform Percy's novels, the more he may understand what Percy is trying to say and the more he may appreciate Percy's accomplishment in expressing his philosophical ideas so skillfully in fictional form. Critics and readers may …

Jane Austen sprinkles deaths throughout her novels as plot devices and character indicators, but she does not tackle death directly. Yet death pervades her novels, in a subtle yet brutal way, in the lives of her female characters. Austen reveals that death was the definition and the destiny of women; it was the driving force behind the social and economic constructs that ruled the eighteenth-century woman's life, manifested in language, literature, religion, art, and even in a woman's doubts about herself. In Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland discovers that women, like female characters in gothic texts, are written and rewritten by the men whose language dominates them. Catherine herself becomes an example of real gothic when she is silenced and her spirit murdered by Henry Tilney. Marianne Dashwood barely escapes the powerful male constructs of language and literature in Sense and Sensibility. Marianne finds that the literal, maternal, wordless language of women counts for nothing in the social world, where patriarchal,figurative language rules, and in her attempt to channel her literal language into the social language of sensibility, she is placed in a position of more deadly nothingness, cast by society as a scorned woman and expected to die. Fanny Price …

Early American writer Hugh Henry Brackenridge conceived and developed a code of modern chivalry in his writings that culminated in the long prose satire Modern Chivalry. He first introduced his code in the poem "The Modern Chevalier," in which a modern knight is shown traveling about the country in an attempt to understand and correct the political absurdities of the people. In Modern Chivalry, this code is developed in the three major themes of rationalism, morality, and moderation and the related concern that man recognize his proper place in society. Satire is Brackenridge's weapon as well as the primary aesthetic virtue of his novel. The metaphor of modern chivalry serves to tie the various elements of the rambling book into a unified whole.

This thesis is concerned with establishing the nature of the critical standard which Fraser's Magazine, a Victorian journal, used in evaluating the artistic merit of current English novels. Eminent critics such as William Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle, and William Maginn were associated with the magazine during its early years of publication: thus, the early numbers contain some of its most valuable criticism. Because the English novel was in a period of transition in the decade of the 1840's and the years immediately preceding and following it, this study is confined to the twenty-year period from I830 to 1850. Imitative writers of romance and novels of manners were gradually being replaced with novelists concerned with social reform and with the artistic merit of the genre itself. Thackeray's and Maginn's associations with the magazine also occurred during this period, and their literary opinions are an important indication of the magazine's critical development.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether the setting of the verb movement parameter in L2 is dependent on agreement acquisition. The Optionality hypothesis (Eubank, 1994) is tested by examining the L2 grammar of Chinese learners of English. To test this hypothesis, the sentence matching procedure originally described in Freedman and Forster (1985) is used. It is found that no current theory truly accounts for the results that are obtained.

This study is an examination of the rhetorical concept of the dialectic as it is realized in selected works of North American dystopian literature. The dialectic is one of the main factors in curtailing enlightenment rationalism which, taken to an extreme, would deny man freedom while claiming to bestow freedom upon him. The focus of this dissertation is on an analysis of twentieth-century dystopias and the dialectic of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable which is a precursor to dystopian literature. The Grand Inquisitor parable of The Brothers Karamazov is a blueprint for dystopian states delineated in anti-utopian fiction. Also, Dostoevsky's parable constitutes a powerful dialectical struggle between polar opposites which are presented in the following twentieth-century dystopias: Zamiatin's Me, Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The dialectic in the dystopian genre presents a give and take between the opposites of faith and doubt, liberty and slavery, and it often presents the individual of the anti-utopian state with a choice. When presented with the dialectic, then, the individual is presented with the capacity to make a real choice; therefore, he is presented with a hope for salvation in the totalitarian dystopias of modern twentieth-century literature.

Eudora Welty and Wallace Stevens share important aesthetic beliefs, especially regarding uses of the creative imagination by artists in acts of creation and characters in acts of living. A close reading of seventeen of Welty's stories, accompanied by references to related ideas in many of Stevens' poems, reveals how the imagination functions as epistemology and eucharist, while governing the shape of individual human views of the quotidian. The more abstract patterns of thought in their later works seem to move Welty closer to belief in a world beyond the quotidian than they do Stevens.

This thesis is composed of a collection of thirty-four original poems with an introduction by the author. The introduction attempts to justify the collection by discussing common influences and techniques employed in its creation. The introduction also supplies background information on each poem and, on occasion, discusses the relation of a poem to the rest of the collection.

With the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn. N. Scott Momaday ended a three-decade hiatus in the production of works written by Native American writers, and contributed to the renaissance of a rich literature. The critical acclaim that the novel received helped to establish Native American literature as a legitimate addition to American literature at large and inspired other Native Americans to write. Contemporary Native American literature from 1969 to 1974 focuses on the themes of the alienated mixed-blood protagonist and his struggle to survive, and the progressive return to a forgotten or rejected Indian identity. For example, works such as Leslie Silko's Ceremony and James Welch's Winter in the Blood illustrate this dual focal point. As a result, scholarly attention on these works has focused on the theme of struggle to the extent that Native American literature can be perceived as necessarily presenting victimized characters. Yet, Native American literature is essentially a literature of survival and continuance, and not a literature of defeat. New writers such as Louise Erdrich, Hanay Geiogamah, and Simon Ortiz write to celebrate their Indian heritage and the survival of their people, even though they still use the themes of …