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    Impressions of war : the private propaganda of Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Anderson, Miranda
    In this thesis I will explore the relationship between modernist fiction, the world wars, and British war propaganda, with its foundational distinction between soldier and civilian experience. This exploration will focus on the novels of two modernist authors who seem to fall on either side of this distinction: Ford Madox Ford, a soldier, veteran, and propagandist, and Virginia Woolf, a self-proclaimed anti-war civilian. Existing scholarship on Ford and Woolf has served to reinforce British war propaganda’s guiding distinction between experience on the war front and the home front by examining Woolf as an apolitical female civilian and Ford as a conventional soldier writer. However, this binary fails to acknowledge the full spectrum of war experience, which unfolds both on the front and at home in similar ways, resonating in the lives of both soldier and civilian figures within and beyond fiction. This thesis examines these resonances and challenges existing critical accounts of Ford and Woolf through a comparative representational analysis of Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade’s End (1924-28), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Between the Acts (1941), revealing that these novels challenge the state-sanctioned opposition between soldier and civilian experiences. Through the analysis of three “formal-experiential constellations” central to these novels—cyclical temporality, fragmentation, and stream of consciousness—I will argue that Ford and Woolf’s fictional representations of war experience, and the modernist devices they use to capture these experiences, serve both to evoke the lived experience of war, and to undermine the false propagandist model of war experience. Together, these devices communicate a model of war experience that more closely aligns with a lived experience that is often cyclical, fragmentary, and intersubjective. In this process they create a pluralistic, shared, and distinctly modernist vision of war: a kind of private propaganda.
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    Placement and displacement : the fallen woman in discourse : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1993) Dacre, Anna
    This thesis is an invitation to reconsider the process of reading and representing the fallen woman. It combines an eclectic theoretical approach, drawing on works by Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva, with the metaphor of colonisation and the palimpsest. Using this construction, the thesis examines the placement of the fallen woman in discourse. The first section discusses how she falls in discourse, and uses textual and visual examples (predominantly Esther Barton from Gaskell's Mary Barton, Monica Widdowson and Rhoda Nunn from Gissing's The Odd Women). The reading of these figures uncovers three characteristic issues in the fallen woman's representation: her construction as murderer, the 'justice' of her death, and her pornographic interaction with the reader. This examination of the placement of the fallen woman continues in the second section. Here, the thesis explores how representations of her placement in discourse also suggest a displacement--that is, how her fall in discourse is a fall from discourse. Reading her site as a palimpsest of colonising representations uncovers the placement and displacement of the fallen woman in discourse.
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    An anatomy of third world literature : Northrop Frye's theory of modes in a post-colonial context : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1992) M'Marete, Gideon Nteere
    Viney Kirpaul ( 1988; pp 144, 145) points out that there is no 'relevant critical framework' within which to analyse the Third World novel, and so the common practice is to consider it a version of the nineteenth-century Western novel. Within a framework based on the first essay of Frye' s Anatomy of Criticism, this thesis argues that four different modes of Third World fiction must be distinguished, and that within each mode some forms are episodic (if they develop only a small number of archetypes) and others encyclopaedic (because of their range of archetypes and techniques). Chapter One deals with the theory and scope of the study. The subsequent chapters analyse twenty episodic and four encyclopaedic works in four different modes, chosen from Africa, India and the Caribbean. A comprehensive glossary explaining the critical terms used in the thesis adds more texts as examples, including some from the South Pacific region. At the centre of the study are such well-known Third World authors as Ngugi, Raj a Rao, Lamming, Bhattacluu·ya, Achebe, Naipaul, and Ayi Kwei Armah, while the glossary adds the works of others, including Narayan, S oyinka, Derek Walcott, Albert Wendt and Witi Ihimaera.
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    The descent of man : re-envisionings of "the fall" in post-Darwinian novels : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2010) Irvine, Anaise
    In On the Origin of Species, Darwin presented a revised creation narrative which contradicted and superseded the Judeo-Christian narrative in Genesis. His second significant text, The Descent of Man, reflects in its title the ideological and philosophical impact his ideas have had in reversing the anthropocentric assumptions of humanism. This research examines how Darwinian theories have been mediated by science writers and incorporated by literary critics and authors, with emphasis on the representation of Edenic archetypes and the renegotiation of hierarchical relationships between animal, human, and posthuman forms. The thesis is divided into two parts. Part One explores critical responses to Darwinism. In popular science writing, a renewed emphasis has emerged on the dominance of human nature over nurture, and human activities (including art and culture) have been explained in terms of their adaptive functions. In literary criticism, the new school of Literary Darwinism has begun reading texts as expressions of biological drives. Part Two uses a modified form of Literary Darwinism to analyse pairs of literary texts which negotiate the anxieties raised by the implications of Darwinian theory. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Brave New World (1932) express the fear that mad scientists might exploit their knowledge of evolutionary science to create new, genetically altered species whose freedoms are curtailed by their creators. As Darwinian evolution gained credence, later novels turned away from fear of the scientist and towards fear of the science. Works such as Lord of the Flies (1954) and Galapagos (1985) explore the notion of human as beast, depicting biological and/or societal ‘devolution’ scenarios in which humanistic higher reasoning loses ground to animalism. More recent novels have combined the fears of mad scientists and devolved humanity to imagine future societies in which the genetic alteration of humans is controlled and politicised. In Oryx and Crake (2003), one dangerous and errant mind genetically extinguishes the human race and creates, in its place, a race of naive and unsophisticated posthumans. And in Genesis (2006), the human race is merely something to be studied by a post-apocalyptic chimp-android hybrid species which is physically devolved, but sufficiently advanced intellectually to have conquered humanity. In all of these novels, the depictions of alternative and future societies run alongside re-envisionings of the ‘fall of man’. In their Darwinian updates of the Fall, authors imagine evolutionary biology to be the Tree of Knowledge from which their Adams and Eves eat. Their new societies thus become alternate (inverted) versions of Eden; however rather than the lost paradise of Genesis, these Darwinian Edens are prisons which leave residents trapped and stripped of their humanity.
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    Older people and ageing in the fiction of Thomas Hardy : a thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts, Department of English and Media Studies, Division of Humanities, Massey University, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2009) Sainsbury, Dick
    In recent years interest in literary gerontology, the study of older people and ageing in literary works, has grown. Interest has focussed on whether old people are portrayed negatively or positively in writing and the other arts, and whether the study of old people in literary works can help gerontologists in their understanding of ageing. The present thesis explores the issues of older people and ageing in the fiction of Thomas Hardy concentrating particularly on four novels: Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders and Two on a Tower, although reference is made to other works. The working hypothesis is that ‘Older people and ageing play a central and hitherto undersestimated role in the vital themes considered in Hardy’s fiction’. Hardy was chosen because very little has been written about the subject in his work and because he is such a shrewd observer of character and a perceptive social critic. I conclude that older people and ageing do play a substantial part in the Hardy fiction canon. The major themes are: a close consideration of social issues expressed through the words and actions of older people; the significance of psychological adaptations to ageing in his characters; the investigation of relationships between people of disparate ages; and the use of the symbolism of antiquity represented in buildings, institutions, archaeology and nature to amplify the changes brought about by modernity. The subject is worthy of further and more detailed study.