Of what interest would an Oedipus be who fell victim to the fate of marrying, say, his aunt?Bert States, Irony and DramaThe Orestes is the most Euripidean of all Euripidean plays, reflecting his typical techniques, emphases, interests, and outlook. All the familiar signs are present and perceptible: for example, novelty of plot, rapidity and multiplicity of action, sensationalism and theatrical virtuosity, lyrical experimentation, increase in the cast of characters on stage, comic and melodramatic elements, the illusion-reality game, the ergon-logos paradox, the use of cliche and rhetoric, a focus on the phenomenon of alienation, on the psychopathology of characters, their natural victimage and their subsequent retaliatory reflex, the secularization of myth, the questioning of inherited values, and compensatory themes of philia and sōtēria, etc. etc.What marks the difference in this play is the extent to which these implications are carried out, the outer limits to which these techniques are pushed; it is a question of intensification, escalation, a question of a relentless drive towards the achievement of a theatrical ‘style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature,’ to quote Borges' definition of his own baroque technique. Yet the aesthetic boldness of the play's excesses moves it out beyond any formal definitions and limitations, beyond parody, beyond outrage into another mode, one might say, to a new level of self-consciousness and authorial extravagance that does not seem to have existed before. And it is a play whose surface of seeming incoherence, instability and chaos is, in reality, under that kind of artistic control that brings about that fusion of form and content we call art, even as it always seems to be trying to escape from it.

The closet of masks: role-playing and myth-making in the Orestes of Euripides

Bergson, Eliot, and American literature

vi List of Abbreviations Used vii Acknowledgements viii Chapter

Habitable Cities: Modernism, Urban Space, and Everyday Life

This thesis examines the relationship between modernist poetry and nature, place and the environment. Challenging reductive notions of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, it argues that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world and environmental issues. The poets studied in this thesis were writing during a period of significant changes in human/nature relations following the disruptive experience of war and modernity. This thesis considers how each poet responds to these changes and examines the various poetic techniques and approaches employed in order to achieve physical, psychological and artistic reconnection with the non-human world.
An ecocritical approach is used to show the importance of nature in the work of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew. This approach focuses on the poetic treatment of nature and involves: examining representations of non-human life in both rural and urban environments, identifying the poetic techniques and approaches used to modernise poetic descriptions of the natural world, and charting the growth of an environmental consciousness in each poet.
This thesis reveals the importance of nature, place and the environment to British modernist poetry and in doing so contributes to knowledge of an under-examined aspect of the movement. It shows the ability of ecocriticism to provide valuable insights into areas of literature not immediately associated with environmental issues and produces original readings of each poet’s work.

'The earth-haunted mind': the search for reconnection with nature, place and the environment in the poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew

The city has always held the promise of utopia, the intimation that it be the spatial form within which a harmonious and wholesome society could take shape, as the emanation of a civic, rational, or holy order. And as often, the city has been associated with the opposite: with the failure of such an order to take hold, and with the sense that an imminent end-time could upend the social and cultural fabric of humankind in the form of its perhaps most celebrated cultural artefact. This chapter examines utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic renderings of the city in literature.

D. E. S. Maxwell

Papers

Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry