Knowledge Bank

This thesis is an examination of three themes across three modernist novels. I look at Father's Suicide, Spurned Union and Birth as Death as they take place (or fail to take place) in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and James Joyce's Ulysses.

As a framework, I have adopted Marie Laure-Ryan's Possible Worlds Theory as laid out in her Possible Worlds, Artificial Inteligence and Narrative Theory. This allows me to discuss the aforementioned themes as products of various modal systems (axiological, epistemic, deontic), which in turn allows me to examine the way the three novels relate to each other and to their common modernist milieu.

Advisor: Sebastian Knowles