This thesis examines the ministerial call in three novels by William Golding, specifically The Spire, Darkness Visible, and Rites of Passage. The central character of each novel, a Christian minister, has a vision, or series of visions, which dominates his life. The call and vision(s) of Golding's ministers are examined in light of Jacques Ellul's The Humiliation of the Word, a work examining the differences between the word and the image. The ministerial call, in this thesis, is linked to Ellul's ideas about the word; the vision, in this thesis, is linked to Ellul's ideas of the image. As a result of following their vision(s) rather than their call, the ministers fail, and their lives end in despair and ruin.

Outer Edges of the Middle Kingdom is a narrative by the author about his two years as a teacher in the People's Republic of China. Organized chronologically, the account begins in August, 1985, and ends in June, 1987. The narrator describes meeting students at Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, designing English classes for English majors, daily episodes in the classroom, and interaction with Chinese colleagues. The narrative alternates between life on a university campus and extensive trips the narrator made to various cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, Guilin, Harbin, Hohot, and Guangzhou. Also recounted are the narrator's reactions to the student demonstrations of December, 1986, and the resulting anti-bourgeois liberation campaign of January-April, 1987.

This study arranges symptoms of polarity into a causal sequence# beginning with the origin of contrarieties and ending with the ultimate effect. The origin is considered as the fall of man, denoting both a mythic concept and a specific act of betrayal. This study argues that a sense of separateness precedes the fall or act of separation; the act of separation produces various kinds of fragmentation; and the fragments are reunited through paradox. Therefore, a causal relationship exists between the "fall" motif and the concept of paradox.

Contemporary analysis of Wuthering Heights necessitates a re-appraisal in light of advancements in the study of incest in non-literary fields such as history, anthropology, and especially psychology. A modern reading suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Heathcliff and Cathy's expectation of normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. John Milton's Paradise Lost provides a paradigm by which to examine the consequences of incest from two perspectives: that of incest as a metaphor for evil, as represented in Heathcliff; that of incest as symbolic of pre-Lapsarian innocence, as represented in Cathy. The tragic consequences of Heathcliff and Cathy's incestuous fixation are resolved by the socially-condoned marriage of Hareton and Catherine, which illuminates Bronte's belief in the Miltonic theme that good inevitably triumphs over evil.