Browsing by Author "Knox-Shaw, Peter"

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    The dark circus : an examination of the work of Mervyn Peake, with reference to selected prose and verse
    (1983) Marx, Lesley Glen; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    I have attempted in this dissertation to draw together a number of strands that make up the intricate and often bizarre tapestry of Mervyn Peake's work. In the Introduction, I raise an issue that seems to be most central to his vision: the relationship of the artist to worlds both real and imaginary, and the way in which these two worlds relate to each other. In Chapter One, I attempt to examine the multi-faceted nature of Peake's talent. Drawn to all the variety of life, expressing his perception of that variety in many different ways, he tries to come to terms with both the aching beauty and tenderness of the world and its horror and ugliness, often, indeed, revealing beauty in that ugliness. The chapter deals, then, with the poetry, both the joyful and the tormented, with the Nonsense world which informs so much of Peake's vision, and with the need to balance the contrary forces of life which he often reveals so tellingly. Chapter Two brings us to the heart of his vision in Titus Groan. In this chapter I deal with the nature of fantasy and its relation to other modes of opening out the real so that its richness may be revealed: ranance, the marvellous,Gothic. I then examine these in terms of the mythic world that is Gorrnenghast, paying particular attention to ritual and the ways in which the characters in the novel respond to their world, often through escape into private worlds and secret rituals. Peake's use of the grotesque is examined in relation to whether characters are able to grow through their private rituals. The mythic world is again important in Gorrnenghast but here we find a tension between Titus who is at once a part of and apart from his environment, and the Castle which is at once oppressive and nurturing. The ambivalence of attitude that Titus experiences offers a focus for the conflict experienced by the other characters in response to the Castle. Titus is seen to be torn between his role as epic hero of his society and as romantic hero, true to his own impulses. Consequently, the movement towards an assimilation of outer and inner worlds is of vital importance and throughout one is aware that Peake, too, is trying to achieve this assimilation. Having vindicated himself as epic hero of the sheltering canmunity, Titus grows out of the mythic stillness of Gormenghast and in Titus Alone, .we see him confronted by a dystopic world bound to linear time. It is in this deracinated world that Titus learns the value of the Mother that is Gormenghast. He realises that it has given him a set of values that he may bear inside him, that informs and beautifies the world. The parallel between Titus's experience of myth and Peake's experience of imagination is clear, as both put their worlds to the test - the one by physical separation, the other by courageous self-travesty.
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    The explorer in English fiction
    (1985) Knox-Shaw, Peter; Haresnape, Geoffrey
    Although there have been a number of critical works on the novel given over to topics such as adventure, colonization or the politics of the frontier, a comparative study of novels in which an encounter with unknown territory holds central importance has till now been lacking. My aim in this thesis is to analyse and relate a variety of texts which show representatives of a home culture in confrontation with terra incognita or unfamiliar peoples. There is, as it turns out, a strong family resemblance between the novels that fall into this category whether they belong, like Robinson Crusoe, Coral Island or Lord of the Flies, to the "desert island" tradition where castaways have exploration thrust upon them or present, as in the case of Moby Dick, The Lost World or Voss, ventures deliberately undertaken. There are frequent indications, too, that many of the novelists in question are aware of working within a particular, subsidiary genre. This means, in sum, even when it comes to texts as culturally remote as, say, Captain Singleton and Heart of Darkness that there is firm ground for comparison. The emphasis of this study is, in consequence, historical as well as critical. In order to show that many conventions which are recurrent in the fiction inhere in the actual business of coming to grips with the unknown, I begin with a theoretical introduction illustrated chiefly from the writings of explorers. Travelogues reveal how large a part projection plays in every rendering of unvisited places. So much is imported that one might hypothesize, for the sake of a model, a single locality returning a stream of widely divergent images over the lapse of years. In effect it is possible to demonstrate a shift of cultural assumptions by juxtaposing, for example, a passage that tricks out a primeval forest in all the iconography of Eden with one written three centuries later in which - from essentially the same scene - the author paints a picture of Malthusian struggle and survival of the fittest. And since the explorer is not only inclined to embody his image of the natural man in the people he meets beyond the frontiers of his own culture, but is likely also to read his own emancipation from the constraints of polity in terms of a return to an underlying nature, the concern with genesis is one that recurs with particular persistence in texts dealing with exploration. With varying degrees of awareness novelists have responded, ever since Defoe, to the idea that the encounter with the unfamiliar mirrors the identity of the explorer. Their presentations of terra incognita register the crucial phases of social history - the institution of mercantilism, the rise and fall of empire - but generally in relation to psychological and metaphysical questions of a perennial kind. The nature of man is a theme that proves, indeed, remarkably tenacious in these works, for a reason Lawrence notes in Kangaroo: "There is always something outside our universe. And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul".
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    Forms of cohesion : the development of style in the novels of Virginia Woolf
    (1981) Swartz, Sally G; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    This thesis, in exploring the changing forms of cohesion in the novels of Virginia Woolf, will use the distinction between the metaphoric and metonymic modes as the basis of its argument. The study will be divided into 5 parts: the development of style and change; in the form of cohesion; textual cohesion; structural cohesion; discourse as a cohesive element in the novel; and thematic cohesion.
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    The language of painting in nineteenth-century English fiction
    (1995) Van Pletzen, Ermina Dorothea; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    This thesis examines the material and aesthetic sustenance which the novel as developing genre drew from the burgeoning popular interest in the visual arts, particularly the pictorial arts, which took place during the course of the nineteenth century in Britain. The first chapter develops the concept of the language of painting which for the purposes of the thesis refers to the linguistic transactions occurring between word and pictorial image when writers on art formulate their impressions in language. This type of discourse is described as governed by conceptual repetition and firmly established techniques of ekphrasis, as well as by indirect and peripheral modes of reference, not to the concrete stylistic features of the works of art under consideration, but to their effect on the viewer, the metaphors they call to mind, and the processes which can be inferred about their conception. The first chapter also gives a survey of the most important thematic strains and structural developments which had been imported into literature by the end of the eighteenth century. A chapter is then dedicated to each of five nineteenth-century novelists, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James, mapping out their individual grasp and knowledge of pictorial art in their particular circumstances, their experience of the art world, and the extent to which their experience of art is mediated by current painterly discourses. Each chapter next considers how pictorial material is appropriated in these novelists' fiction and whether the fiction draws structural support and meaning from pictorial concepts. The thesis furthermore investigates the inverse question of how the fiction itself becomes a context which not only reflects, but also shapes and alters inherited languages of painting. The second chapter approaches Austen's social satire against the background of the aesthetic traditions which she inherits from the eighteenth century. It is argued that her own novelistic aesthetic gains more from the discourses surrounding the practice of picturesque landscape appreciation (and related forms) than from Reynolds's doctrine of the general and ideal dominating the mid to late eighteenth century.
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    Milton and the Zohar
    (1993) Melnick, Alan; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    This research is a comparative investigation of Milton and the Zohar divided into six Chapters. The similarities in ideas are discussed and possible indebtedness to the Kabbalah is duly noted where appropriate. In Chapter One the central symbolical code of the 'tree of life' is related to the philosophical structure of Paradise Lost and Camus, divided into the ensuing sections: intellect and passion; beauty; justice and mercy; intellect and intuition; the crown; the evolution of man and the journey from sephirot to sephirot; the four worlds in the universe and the three aspects of the soul. Chapter Two is concerned with the creation of the universe and due attention is given to the following: the revelation of the future to Adam; the emanation of matter from God; the process of creation from darkness; the transcendence of God; the existence of sin or the need to justify creation; the creation of Adam; the implied creation of Adam as an androgynous being; the sexuality of the stars and other planets; creation based on duality; creation as an emanation from thought; the loss of direct communication with God. In Chapter Three the fall from a paradisal innocence and the position on marital affairs. in Milton's works and the Zahar is investigated including: the victory of carnal appetite over the higher mind; seduction in Samson Agonistes; the transformation of Adam's and Eve's ethereal bodies after the fall; 'appetite' while in the Garden; attitudes towards divorce; soul mates; procreation. In Chapter Four the discussion includes reference to Satan or Samael in the Zahar and the ensuing sections: a comparison between Sin and Lilith; the fallen angel Azazel; the goat as an evil animal; the 'evil eye'; Adramelec and Balaam; the sorcery of Balak (the demonic bird). Chapter Five continues with an investigation of the left-hand path or sitra-ahra focusing on: hell as a locality; hell as a psychological reality within the individual; hell as the 'shadow' within the subconscious; the left-hand path and judgement; Satan, Samael and Hitler; the chariot of paternal deity. In the final Chapter various aspects of the Messianic kingdom are considered: the apocalypse and the millenium; the arbor vitae of Eden and the second paradise; the promise of a future redeemer foretold by Michael or Raziel; the removal of evil from earth; the coming of the Messiah as a cosmic cycle or shemittah; the rainbow as a herald of peace.
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    O. Douglas and the borders of fictional identity
    (2007) Patrick, James; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    The purpose of the thesis is to contribute to the developing research in Scottish literature and the broader movement of recovery of forgotten or comparatively neglected Scottish (women) writers.
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    Philip Larkin : a critical study of the poetry in relation to relevant conventions and traditions of twentieth-century writing
    (1987) Brumage, Adrienne Elizabeth; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    My approach in this thesis has been thematic rather than chronological: I attempt to treat Larkin's poetry in detail and as representatively as possible, but the discussion takes place in relation to dominant figures and movements in the poetic practice of the twentieth century. I have chosen to concentrate on Larkin's mature poetry, for the break with the method of The North Ship is so unusually distinct that the inclusion of this earlier volume would, for my purposes, be distracting rather than informative. Within the three later volumes I do see some signs of development though no major shift of emphasis.
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    Pope's portraiture : a critical examination of portraiture in the poetry of Alexander Pope
    (1986) Hay-Whitton, Alexander Mark; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    This work examines and critically evaluates what the author considers to be the chief concerns of Pope's verse portraits, and particularly attempts to trace the manifestations of these concerns in the formal, rather than argumentative or polemic, qualities of Pope's writing. The works selected have accordingly been primarily those in which the density of poetic description of character was sufficient to indicate implicit qualities of psychological interest, sometimes at remarkable variance with more express argument of contemporary theories. Starting from an initial agreement with Dr Johnson concerning Pope's shortcomings as a philosopher, the author chooses works for detailed study on the basis of the various ways they present human types and characters: through a semi-dramatic narrative presentation, through brief life-histories, through descriptive character-sketches, or through implication of character by environment. The author bases much of his work on the idea of a dual interest in Pope's verse, which is partly satiric and aimed at moral.or social correction, partly humorous and aimed at examination or elucidation of human nature. The Dunciad and An Essay on Man are examples of the two interests as opposite extremes; but in most of Pope's work, the author maintains, the functions are complementary.
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    Textual solipsism in J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands
    (2006) Powers, Donald; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    In this dissertation I examine through a close reading of J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands (1974) the textual dymamic that impels the two narrator-protagonists toward the solipsist position - the ground of the true Cartesian. I show how Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee are presented as products of Western print culture and children of RenƃĀ© Descartes: literate and acutely self-conscious. I note how each conceives himself according to Descartes' mind-body dualism as primarily a thinking thing. I argue that this self-conception is reinforced by their paradoxical presence-as-absence as figures in a fiction.
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    The tripod in the dunny : a study of Patrick White's sylleptic habits
    (1994) Merrington, David John; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    This thesis is a study of relations between aspects of Patrick White's prose style and his perception of a moral equivocation that is entailed in the construction of identity and in the making of fiction. Chapter One presents examples of White's sylleptic style. The virtuosity of the figure is seen to reflect the discursive puissance of a detached and ironic narrative stance. His habitually ironic perspective is ascribed to his apparent sense that human life is governed by fiction, and that such governance is morally equivocal. The chapter concludes with the specification of gossip as a malicious social discourse which, for White, also reflects the practice of narrative fiction. In Chapter Two the analogy between fiction and gossip is developed. The discourse of repute is seen to exercise a perverse and vicarious dominance over its object. This governance by a morally equivocal discourse is considered to illustrate White's habitual apprehension of a universally ironic dispensation under which the human subject exists. The role and the conduct of authorship is examined as the "voice" which governs and articulates such a dispensation. Aspects of M.M. Bakhtin's theory of carnival are adduced, in Chapter Three, to the analysis of-narrative irony. The figure of syllepsis is considered as a stylistic formula for the carnivalesque. The concept of a reactionary "counter-carnival" is formulated, and is used to examine the equivocal energies of White's ironic dispensation. Chapter Four focuses on the carnivalesque dialectic between the orthodox and the grotesque "other". "Illicit knowledge" of the grotesque is seen to be cognate with the discourse of repute and gossip, and the artist is found to be guilty of vicarious appropriations. Chapter Five is an extended analysis of The Twyborn Affair as White's allegory 'of fiction. The chapter is in two parts: the first focuses on the discursive means by which theĀ· fiction of "Eudoxia Vatatzes" is constructed. The flaws in such "authorship" are examined, and this "text" is seen to be a vulnerable and unreliable narrative structure. The second part traces the development of Eddie Twyborn as a fictional "text", through his personae as a jackeroo and as Eadith Trist the brothelkeeper. The Coda comprises brief illustrations, from Three Uneasy Pieces, of Patrick White's last thoughts on authorship.
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    "Variations of the rainbow" : mysticism, history and aboriginal Australia in Patrick White
    (1987) Taylor, Colleen Jane; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    This study examines Patrick White's Voss, Riders in the Chariot and A Fringe of Leaves. These works, which span White's creative career, demonstrate certain abiding preoccupations, while also showing a marked shift in treatment and philosophy. In Chapter One Voss is discussed as an essentially modernist work. The study shows how White takes an historical episode, the Leichhardt expedition, and reworks it into a meditation on the psychological and philosophical impulses behind nineteenth century exploration. The aggressive energy required for the project is identified with the myth of the Romantic male. I further argue that White, influenced by modernist conceptions of androgyny, uses the cyclical structure of hermetic philosophy to undermine the linear project identified with the male quest. Alchemical teaching provides much of the novel's metaphoric density, as well as a map for the narrative resolution. Voss is the first of the novels to examine Aboriginal culture. This culture is made available through the visionary artist, a European figure who, as seer, has access to the Aboriginal deities. European and Aboriginal philosophies are blended at the level of symbol, making possible the creative interaction between Europe and Australia. The second chapter considers how, in Riders in the Chariot, White modifies premises central to Voss. A holocaust survivor is one of the protagonists, and much of the novel, I argue, revolves around the question of the material nature of evil. Kabbalism, a mystical strain of Judaism, provides much of the esoteric material, am White uses it to foreground the conflict between metaphysical abstraction and political reality. In Riders, there is again an artist-figure: part Aboriginal, part European, he is literally a blend of Europe and Australia and his art expresses his dual identity. This novel, too, is influenced by modernist models. However, here the depiction of Fascism as both an historical crisis and as a contemporary moral bankruptcy locates the metaphysical questions in a powerfully realised material dimension. Chapter Three looks at A Fringe of Leaves, which is largely a post-modernist novel. One purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how it responds to its literary precursors and there is thus a fairly extensive discussion of the shipwreck narrative as a genre. The protagonist of the novel, a shipwreck survivor, cannot apprehend the symbolic life of the Aboriginals: she can only observe the material aspects of the culture. Symbolic acts are thus interpreted in their material manifestation. The depiction of Aboriginal life is less romanticised than that given in Voss, as White examines the very real nature of the physical hardships of desert life. The philosophic tone of A Fringe of Leaves is most evident, I argue, in the figure of the failed artist. A frustrated writer, his models are infertile, and he offers no vision of resolution. There is a promise, however, offered by these novels themselves, for in them White has given a voice to women, Aboriginals and convicts, groups normally excluded from the dominating discursive practice of European patriarchy.