This thesis compares the uses of the classical underworld descent, or katabasis, in three contemporary English-language authors, women and/or Black writers, as an instrument to express their... Show moreThis thesis compares the uses of the classical underworld descent, or katabasis, in three contemporary English-language authors, women and/or Black writers, as an instrument to express their poetics. It focuses on one central text from each author, contextualizing its use of katabasis within the author's larger oeuvre. For this analysis, use has been made of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and cognitive theory of allegory, theories of metaliterature and intertextuality, and transgeneric narratology. Katabasis has proven to hold a central position in the oeuvre of all three authors, albeit in very different ways. In the work of Boland and Naylor, the motif is omni-present. Boland maps katabasis onto the moment of poetic creativity, in which access to the female underworld is attempted, but nevertheless remains barred. Naylor's work combines the various regions of Dante's afterlife with western esotericism, offering a somewhat happier prospect for women and writing. For Walcott, on the other hand, katabasis is omni-present in his magnum opus Omeros only, and is applied as a final reckoning with his literary critics. Thus, for all three authors katabasis has proven to be used as an instrument to appropriate the western literary canon and to define their poetics. Show less
__More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as Ballads and Libels__. This is how the lawyer and scholar John Selden (1584__1654) described an important characteristic of the... Show more__More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as Ballads and Libels__. This is how the lawyer and scholar John Selden (1584__1654) described an important characteristic of the songs that he collected in printed form, the so-called broadside ballads. This study is an examination of an aspect of popular culture that reached its zenith in the mid-seventeenth century. Among the issues under discussion are the ways in which broadside ballads acted almost as a subversive subculture, with writers, engravers and printers drawing on a shared and allusive body of subject matter. Thus, while the broadside ballad may be a popular and unsophisticated form of literature, it is not a simple and straightforward song. Its message is often shaped to a considerable extent by allusions and references to other broadside ballads, and the seventeenth-century ballad audience was apparently expected t o be familiar with a wide range of ballads in order to be able to interpret the __ sometimes subversive __ references to ballad literature. Issues such as the choice of a tune, and the printers__ decisions on illustrations and layout are of great importance in this respect as they may considerably influence the message of the political broadside ballad. Show less
Most readers are familiar with the British author John Galsworthy (1867-1933) through his The Forsyte Saga (1922), A Modern Comedy (1929) and The End of the Chapter (1934). He wrote many other... Show moreMost readers are familiar with the British author John Galsworthy (1867-1933) through his The Forsyte Saga (1922), A Modern Comedy (1929) and The End of the Chapter (1934). He wrote many other novels as well, and in his own times he was also known as a leading dramatist. Literary criticism and scholarly publications on Galsworthy’s work have focused predominantly on social abuse, hypocrisy and Victorian morality and the typically fin-de-siècle theme of the changing times. Less attention has been given to Galsworthy’s religious and philosophical development. This dissertation aims to fill this gap. It describes Galsworthy’s development from a biographical, literary, cultural and historical perspective and determines what writers and thinkers have influenced his thinking. The most important writers in this connection are Dickens, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Flaubert, De Maupassant and France. The thinkers that had a significant influence on Galsworthy are Emerson, Arnold, Huxley and Spencer. However, it was especially Henri Bergson’s L’Evolution créatrice (1907) that was to have a marked influence on Galsworthy’s philosophical views on such concepts as determinism versus free will, creation and man’s place within the grand design of the universe. Show less
