Arts and Humanities Commons^™

An Application Of Mikhail Bakhtin’S Theory Of The Grotesque To The Fiction Of Flannery O’Connor, Holly Roberts

Masters Theses

The grotesque in Flannery O'Connor's fiction has always been a central concern of her readers and critics, because it is such a prominent aspect of her work and is usually connected with the equally pervasive characteristics of violence, destruction, and death. Many of her critics see the grotesquerie of her characters and landscapes as indicative of humanity's fallen existence--that it serves only to reveal what is wrong with the human condition. Such views echo the premises of Wolfgang Kayser's theory of the grotesque presented in his well-known book, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, but as I point out, …

Dream In The Fiction Of Nathanael West, James M. Caldwell

Masters Theses

Since the publication of his first novel in 1931, Nathanael West has presented significant problems for critics in their attempts to arrive at conclusions about his work and to classify him among twentieth century novelists. Various critical approaches have helped to clarify some of the ambiguities in West's four novels, but the bibliographic, source, and psychological studies have often often neglected specifics of the texts in favor of finding West a niche in relation to his twentieth century contemporaries.

Most criticism of West's fiction discusses dreams to some extent. His fictions are considered dreamworlds, and each novel's ordering dream is …