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Dissertations & Theses on the
Works of Anthony Powell

The following is a list of academic theses and dissertations if which Anthony Powell's works are a major topic; it is organised roughly with the most recent first. Thanks to Dr Nicholas Birns, Bobb Menk, Dr Michael Henle, Dr Peter Kislinger, Dr John Horton and Prof. Ian Young for searching the available academic databases these older studies. We would welcome information about other theses and dissertations not listed (particularly those from outside the USA); please email us.

Author	Rung, Allison
Title	Restraint and Order: The comic and dramatic designs of Novelist Anthony Powell
Degree	BA
University	Amherst College (USA)
Year	2005

Author	Christie, David
Title	Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music Time: Searching for Secret Harmonies
Degree	MA
University	University of Newcastle, NSW (Australia)
Year	2004
Abstract	A Dance to the Music of Time is a three hundred thousand-word novel, which appeared in twelve instalments, over twenty-five years, between 1951 and 1975. Essentially it is a comic novel, which describes upper middle-class English society from about 1914 to 1971. This thesis is intended to explore text, narrative structure, style, and story of the Dance, as preparation for an explication of the search, by the first person narrator, for patterns and meaning to the events in his life. The opening chapter is an overview of the critical literature concerning the Dance and this is followed by a study of the text, and paratext, of the novel in its various publications over the years. Particular interest was taken in the 'rearrangement', by the publishers, of the twelve books into four trilogies; passing reference was made to the TV, and BBC radio broadcast series. The narrative structure is sophisticated, particularly with respect to Powell's use of time, of iteration of events, and appearances and reappearances of characters. The story is built from the memories of Nicholas Jenkins; with his younger 'experiencing self' as lucid reflector, he selects from his experiences, and arranges them in an order that is not bound to a linear chronology. He is an internally focalised narrator, and the advantages and disadvantages of this arrangement were discussed. A particular feature of Powell's style lies in intertextuality, with paintings, literary excerpts, and musical references being woven into the work. As well as the story of Nicholas Jenkins, whose life is indissolubly linked to that of one of English literature's great comic creations, Kenneth Widmerpool, there are literally hundreds of minor characters with fragmentary stories of their own. The final chapter of the thesis is concerned with the search by Nicholas for a pattern to which the events and experiences of his life might conform, and whether the existence of such a pattern would be consistent with free will.

Author	Koyama Taichi
Title	The Novels of Anthony Powell: A Critical Study
Degree	PhD
University	University of Kent (UK)
Year	2003
Abstract	This dissertation is an attempt to re-evaluate Anthony Powell, a unique author of comic fiction, and to save him from the relative neglect he seems to have fallen into. It purports to provide a summary of Powell's long, productive novelistic career; in particular, it aims to keep in view the relationship between comedy and realistic representation of life, and how the relationship grows and changes in Powell's novels. Powell's pre-war novels, inclining towards elegant but mentally brutal farce, depict human beings as two-dimensional, meaningless, and ultimately unworthy of being taken seriously. However, in A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell's twelve-volume enterprise after WWII, people's struggles in society are captured in a humanely, rather than farcically, comic light. The author accepts the fact that human beings, however incomplete and two-dimensional their existence is, cannot live without trying to build an enclosure of meaning around them for their own happy survival, and, if possible, to enlarge it to the whole society. The efforts of disparate individuals incessantly contradict each other, and are cancelled in the irresponsible movement of the world. As one of such people with a limited view of human life as a whole, Powell and Dance's narrator Jenkins see, not with derision but with humour, numerous people's deluded but serious struggles to give a meaning to their lives, and try to find, rather than impose, a 'choreography' in which they can be connected synchronically and diachronically. The main questions to be answered in this dissertation are: (a) whether Powell's changing comic vision succeeds in displaying a convincing image of society and human life and, (b) if it does, how and to what extent.

Author	Berberich, Christine
Title	Englishness, Nostalgia and the Image of the English Gentleman in 20th-Century Literature
Degree	PhD
University	University of York (UK)
Year	2003

Author	Lilley, George P
Title	Anthony Powell: Bibliography and Aspects of Publishing History
Degree	PhD
University	University of Wales (UK)
Year	2003
Abstract	The thesis is presented in two parts. The second part is the authorised, descriptive and enumerative bibliography of the works of the English novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000). A first version of the bibliography was published in 1993, and was placed on a short-list of three works in 1994 for the Library Besterman Medal. The bibliography covers the major British editions of his books, and the first American hardback editions, together with examples of the major American paperback series. It provides full physical bibliographical descriptions; gives some account of the publishing history of each book including information about its textual history since publication and, where possible, print numbers or sales figures; lists his other published writings including contributions to periodicals, appearance in anthologies or other collective works, introductions or forewords, and edited works. In the entry for the poem Caledonia (A.4), I have given as part of the "Notes", an account of its textual history and of investigations into the circumstances of its printing. The first part explores aspects of the publishing history of Powell's works and of his professional approach to authorship. It examines his changing views on the length and structure of his magnum opus, the twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, and its manner of publication; his textual concerns; his interest in the visual appearance of his books; and his changing views on their adaptation for radio and television. This study draws upon primary archival sources which are fully documented.

Author	Colletta, Lisa
Title	The Triumph of Narcissism: Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel
Degree	PhD
University	Claremont Graduate University (USA)
Year	1999
Abstract	This work examines texts by Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell in light of psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humor. Freud asserts that the "grandeur" of humor lies in its "triumph of narcissism", in the ego's refusal to be overwhelmed and distressed by the provocations of reality. A grimly humorous stance allows for a response to hostile reality that is at once a coping device and a weapon, and rather than surrendering individual subjectivity to the chaotic forces that would threaten it, the ego uses these forces aggressively, as an occasion to gain pleasure and to assert itself. This assertive stance is particularly apposite in social comedy and satire because humor is an inherently social activity, and the negotiation of increasingly confusing and conflicting group identities is the source of much of the comedy and the trauma dealt with by these authors. Unlike conventional notions of satire, which generally emphasize a corrective function, dark humor offers no totalizing answers or salutary effects. Arguing that dark humor is an important characteristic of modernism, this work offers a way of rereading the literature of the period that allows for the inclusion of authors and texts that frequently have been overlooked. The term Modernism itself is imprecise and much-contested, generally referring to writings that are self-consciously avant-garde and that attempted to break with literary and aesthetic forms inherited from the nineteenth-century. This view of Modernism has overlooked much of the social comedy of the period, assessing it as satiric and therefore conservative, reinforcing the very cultural values it sets out to critique. However, the dark comedy in the social satires of the interwar years in Britain is deeply ambivalent and see all forms of ideological and societal constructs as equally oppressive to the individuals within them because of the inability of any system to adequately address the complex nature of human existence. Rather than set avant garde against "conventional", the serious against the merely funny, this work examines in historical context what is shared and common across these forms.

Author	Mason, Elisabeth
Title	Melodic observations: the narrative effects of death on comedy in the novels of Anthony Powell
Degree	BA
University	Amherst College (USA)
Year	1996

Author	Kislinger, Peter
Title	"Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths": Narrative technique, mise-en-abyme and intertextuality, constructice irony and the truth of fiction in Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	University of Vienna (Austria)
Year	1993
Abstract	Based on Genette's Narrative Discourse, Stanzel's A Theory of Narrative and Iser's The Act of Reading, this study of A Dance To The Music of Time offers a unified approach to narrative technique, themes, motifs and imagery. Powell plays upon the admiring and ironic interactional modalities of aesthetic and ethical identification with the "hero". Schopenhauer's theory of history and fiction and Nietzsche's criticism of the correspondence theory of truth are seen, among other influences, as formative on Powell's theory of truth. The fragmentation of the implied poetics of the novel is seen as an original and creative response to Nietzsche's challenging perspectivism and aesthetics: The mise-en-abymes (ie. inherent poetics) draw on different metaphorical sources, recycling the history of the self-reflexive novel. Thus, rather than simply relying on just one model, Powell's mise-en-abymes in turn multiperspectively draw on different metaphorical sources, adopting (and even parodying) the history of the self-reflexive novel. As the narrating act becomes more complex, so does the poetics, paralleling the growth of the experiencing. Aesthetic notions and motifs taken from early Cubism are borrowed to compensate for the restrictions of the first-person narrative situation and to counteract doctrinal, ie. "mono-perspectival", and metaphysical conceptions of truth. The study analyses and evaluates the manifold thematic functions of the complex interrelationships between discourse and story. Drawing on Iser's "structure of theme and horizon", the study demonstrates that the "meaning" of the narrating act cannot be described one-dimensionally. Segments of Jenkins's discourse must be assessed according to the "horizon" of thematically related segments and the "horizon" of the fragmented inherent poetics of the novel. Quotations from hermetical, esp. alchemical traditions indirectly relate the experiencing self's growth and allegorise the creative act. In conjunction with four motif-patterns they serve as structuring devices. Astrology and alchemy are shown by Powell, together with mythological, biblical, Christian, Gnostic and mainstream European philosophical traditions, to be devoid of any transcendental meaning, yet necessary. Stereotype metaphors and motifs are recycled and given new thematic and structural functions. Mosaics, collages, jigsaw puzzles, kaleidoscopes, alchemistic and Greek mythological imagery, as well as the myth of Isis and Osiris, are - with a nod to contemporary noveau roman theories - employed not only as models for the narrating act (the dichotomy of fragmentation and totality), but also reflect the destructive element of time and man's attempt to reconstruct and come to terms with the effects of time. In epiphanies, the experiencing self arrives at notions central to European thinking. Although Powell does not deny the possibility of (individual) growth, the text remains sceptical about the notion of linear development. The Dance forces the reader to find answers, deriving from its structure, yet at the same time it cannot offer such without betraying its ideology of self-autonomy.

Author	Edmonds, Joanne Haldeman
Title	'Memories of Things Real and Imagined': Narratives of Youth and Middle Age in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	Ball State University (USA)
Year	1993
Abstract	This dissertation demonstrates Anthony Powell's skillful adaptation of the traditional Bildungsroman of youth and his innovative employment of an emerging genre – the Bildungsroman of middle age – in order to unfold the story of Nicholas Jenkins, his narrator/protagonist, and especially to develop Jenkins as a character who moves through distinct cycles of change that are analyzed in detail. In addition, looking at Powell's work within the traditional and midlife Bildungsroman and contrasting the characteristics of the second developmental stage with the first allows not only for analysis of the newer genre as practiced by Powell but also for provisional definition of the Bildungsroman of middle life as written by some other contemporary novelists. Jenkins's youthful cycle of development occurs within the first trilogy of spring "season" of Powell's series; the midlife narrative, in the third trilogy or autumn "season". Although Powell's basic metaphor of the dance through time insists on constant change, these transitional seasons of quickened movement make possible the relatively peaceful productivity of summer, the ripeness of winter. In the first trilogy, Jenkins educates himself from the negative examples of failed mentors. Out of his interest in others, his greatest strength, Jenkins develops compassionate and imaginative powers of observation and discovers his identity and vocation as a writer. In the third trilogy, which begins in loss of vocation, Jenkins is forced onto a more challenging road of trials than he travelled in youth and into recognition that even one's own identity cannot remain the same. In the process of constructing a new self, Jenkins must discover new ways of thinking about what constitutes useful human activity. Among the topics considered also in discussion of the newer genre are contrasting definitions of successful action in youth and in middle age, the more open endings of the midlife narratives, as well as the possibility of differing male and female models for midlife Bildungsromane. Study of the complexity of Jenkins's development, therefore, reveals new complexity in the development of the English novel itself.

Author	Mather, Rachel Roser
Title	The Heirs of Jane Austen: Twentieth Century Writers of the Comedy of Manners
Degree	DA
University	St John's University (USA)
Year	1993
Abstract	Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (and letters) and again in Mrs Gaskell's Cranford (at the very least) meant that humor by the great writers, living or dead, was relished by a wide audience. In the second half of the twentieth century not only has reading aloud, except for poetry, become a lost art, but humor has not been taken seriously. The "Lucia" novels of EF Benson, the Provincial Lady Diaries of EM Delafield, the Barsetshire novels of Angela Thirkell of the 1930s and wartime years, and the 1930's novels of Anthony Powell, all early twentieth century writers in the Jane Austen tradition, were eclipsed for forty years by sociological conditions, by the seriousness of the feminist cause, and by the narrow but overriding criterion of seriousness as the way to earn critical attention. The paperback reissues of these works in the 1970s and 1980s (with the exception of those of Anthony Powell, which have remained in print and were also available in paperback) have brought new interest. Plot counts for little in these novels, but setting is heightened, characterization is sharp and, frequently, memorable, and the prose style is of such quality, even if not of eighteenth century resonance, that Cranford's Miss Jenkyns might not reject its being spoken of in the same breath with that of her favorite, Dr Samuel Johnson. With social satire in common, these novels reveal social history, the portrayal of the manners of upper-middle class England in the first half of the twentieth century, connected by Benson to the Edwardians and Anthony Hope's The Dolly Dialogues, and back through Victorian Cranford to Jane Austen. The "feminine humor" of Jane Austen's novels and Cranford leads to the comic view of life of feminist writer EM Delafield and female author Angela Thirkell, and novelists Benson and Powell contribute to that ironic view of the Comedy of Manners.

Author	Thomson, Alexis
Title	Voyeurism and Reading: Narrative Strategy in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	McGill University (Canada)
Year	1991
Abstract	This thesis will argue that Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is a work that can tell us much about our reading process. Powell uses a homodiegetic narrator to tell the stories of a vast array of characters over a large span of time. This narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is, in the non-sexual sense of the word, voyeuristic. He watches and remembers the actions of others while only participating minimally. Widmerpool, the only other character to appear in all twelve volumes, is a voyeur in the sexual sense of the word. The defining feature of voyeurism is its fundamental asymmetry: the voyeur watches whilst remaining hidden and unseen. It will be argued that the reader is also involved in acts of voyeurism due to his/her asymmetrical relationship with the text. Although this equation of voyeurism and reading may seem to contradict recent reader-response critics, it will be argued that voyeurism is an apt description for the primary stage of reading.

Author	Monti, Anthony
Title	Listening for Silence: Comic Mysticism in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	Fordham University (USA)
Year	1991
Abstract	Powell's Dance has been criticized for lacking thematic unity. Though lacking a proposition for its theme, Dance is nevertheless "about" something, comic mysticism.  Dance expresses not a proposition but a process, that of finding meaning by discovering through trial and error the inadequacy and revisability of our preconceptions; we thus discern what Wittgenstein's Tractatus calls "the mystical" – that meaning and value "must lie outside the world" and thus can never be put into "propositions". Dance's narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, discovers this by detaching himself from "all that happens and is the case" so as to view the world comically as "a limited whole"; meaning thus takes the form not of "propositions" but of patterns and metaphors. Together, these constitute the Dance to the Music of Time. Dance and music express comic mysticism by existing only in time (as process) and expressing meaning non-verbally. The dance expresses the union of performer and performance in this process, while music expresses the non-conceptual and therefore "mystical" nature of this process. Dance's form is "musical", resembling a symphony.  Dance's First Movement resembles the "sonata form" of a symphonic first movement, presenting the "exposition", "development", and "recapitulation" of the contrasting "first and second subjects", Jenkins and Widmerpool.  Dance's Second Movement suggests a second movement "theme-and-variations" pattern in which the largely unstated "theme" is Nick's marriage while its "variations" are the marriages or near marriages of others, including Widmerpool.  Dance's Third Movement resembles the dance-like ternary form of a third-movement scherzo, as a "march" suggesting a Dance of Death (as in Tchaikovsky's Sixth and Mahler's Sixth).  Dance's Fourth Movement, like the finale to Mahler's Ninth, is a melancholy farewell to life that brings the music to an end in a "silence" that, because of all that has gone before, takes on "mystical" significance as part of the "music". Comic mysticism can be shown to link Powell to such Modernists as Joyce, Mann, and Proust. Yet by overcoming the distinction between subject and object, comic mysticism also touches on some postmodern concerns. It also helps to account for the difficulty in categorizing Powell, since it questions for usefulness of all categories.

Author	Olin-Ammentorp, Warren Lee
Title	The Epinovel: A Study of Modern British Fiction in Forms Longer than the Novel
Degree	PhD
University	University of Michigan (USA)
Year	1991
Abstract	This study provides a suggestive description of the epinovel, the unified multi-novel work of fiction, as an example of the continuing pattern of self-reflective literary experiment at work throughout the history of the novel. It establishes that epinovels are not simply a minor variation of the novel, showing how epinovels explore the novel's suspicion of its own conventions of narrative closure, focalization, and emplotment. It argues further that acceptance of the epinovel as a major form of narrative fiction permits a new perspective of the workings of both the novel and fictional narrative as a whole. Focusing on examples from the specific context of twentieth-century British fiction, the study further argues that attention to the epinovel suggests the need to revise existing conceptions of that period's literary history. The study begins with a general discussion of the epinovel's history from the eighteenth century, and the theoretical implications of the difference between novel and epinovel. It then proceeds, in two central chapters, to lay out, as an axis for considering specific epinovels, a distinction between epinovels such as CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time that destabilize the conventions of the centralized novel (the Bildungsroman), and those like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and John Galsworthy's Forsyte Chronicles that similarly destabilize the decentralized (or social) novel. Discussion of these works shows at once how each exemplifies the epinovel's general project by extending conventional narrative beyond the limits it usually sets for itself, and how each follows a somewhat different program for this destabilizing extension. The concluding chapter then examines the epinovel in the context of modern British literary history (which has largely characterized it a minor and anti-Modernist form) showing the epinovel's significance as one experimental form in a period of great experiment and development. Finally the study asserts that continuing study of the epinovel, both as a form in itself and as a partner of the novel, will enhance our general understanding of narrative and narrative history.

Author	Hopkins, Christopher Ian
Title	The Theme of Insignificance in Some English Novels of the 1930s
Degree	PhD
University	University of Warwick (UK)
Year	1990
Abstract	This thesis argues that insignificance is a central and consciously-recognised theme in novels written during the 1930s by upper-middle-class authors. It attempts to demonstrate that a sense of insignificance, and a quest for its contrary, significance, determined much of the content, narrative form and verbal texture of a number of types of thirties novel. The thesis is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the concept of insignificance, its relationship to social class and the ways in which it might function in a literary text. The next three parts are devoted to detailed discussion of the thirties novels in which insignificance is a major theme. Each of these parts – focusing on Love, Writing and Politics respectively – examines a particular type of novel, categorised in terms of the area in which it attempts to locate significance. Particular attention is paid to both the literary representation and social context of insignificance and significance in sixteen chapters which discuss novels by the following authors: Elizabeth Bowen, Cyril Connolly, Cecil Day Lewis, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, John Lehmann, Rosamund Lehmann, George Orwell, Anthony Powell, Edward Upward, Evelyn Waugh, and Rex Warner. An appendix traces ways in which the literary phenomenon of insignificance might be related to contemporary ideas of culture, history and politics. The thesis concludes that Love and Writing are topics which equal Politics in importance in thirties novels, and that all of these focuses for significance draw on a widely-held belief of the period that meaninglessness is endemic to English upper-middle-class life. The thesis is particularly interested in the way in which metonymic and metaphoric modes are used to represent insignificance, and in the relationship between modernism and thirties writing.

Author	Joyau, Isabelle FM
Title	An Investigation of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	University of Cambridge (UK)
Year	1990
Abstract	This investigation of A Dance to the Music of Time opens with an assessment of Powell's popularity and reflects on the reasons which might account for the heated controversy the series has elicited. The first chapter focuses on the homodiegetic narrator Nicholas Jenkins. Jenkins's stance as a retrospective narrator, combined with certain traits of his personality, determines the skeptic philosophy and the absence of didactism of the series: life is an insatiable but ultimately quest for the Grail of truth. The second chapter is devoted to temporal aspects. Time is occasionally viewed as a destroyer. Remembrance from a mature vantage point is furthering the cognitive process. The recurring prolepses stress the narrator's Sisyphean split allegiance to a melioristic outlook as well as to misgivings stemming from the crippling limitations of our insight. The changing focus of power and Powell's mythical method are analyzed. The gist of the third chapter is sociological. It emphasizes Powell's gift for articulating the anatomy of social interaction, the waning of traditional forces and the chronicling of intellectual fashions. The accusation of writing for and about a `lq poshocracy is looked into. Steering clear from any preservationist fervour, Powell nevertheless lets his preferences transpire. Chapter four concentrates on the fugue-like, Janus-faced structure, both a quest for order and a concession to disorder. Despite its magnitude, the series is not slipshod. Unifying elements abound. Simultaneously, the jigsaw poiesis and the open ending admirably reflect an era marked by disillusion and mirrors the fragmentariness of human perception. The series functions according to dual modes. Chapter five centres on one of these fundamental dichotomies: surface and depth, illustrated in the superficiality of the world described, the narrator's obliquity, the role of the mask and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Chapter six concentrates on sexuality and its mostly unsavoury aspects as tell-tale signs of a moral wasteland and diseased society. Chapter seven puts the case for the series as comedy - bordering on farce occasionally - rather than satire. Yet, despite its entertaining powers, the novel is also deeply serious, a feat in Schadenfreude. The conclusion stresses the felicities that make Powell's work an enduring pleasure.

Author	Tan, NL
Title	The Uses of Art in the Fiction of Anthony Powell with special reference to A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	Birkbeck College, University of London (UK)
Year	1990
Abstract	This thesis examines Anthony Powell's technique and style in A Dance to the Music of Time. These can only be fully appreciated through an understanding of the wealth of allusion, metaphor and quotation in the text. Drawn from a wide variety of sources, these are the filters through which the narrator Nicholas Jenkins both perceives and presents his view of life, and extends the possibilities of the first person narrative. The forms of art which for Nicholas constitute a parallel world to that of actual existence, and also the metaphorical means of apprehending while portraying everyday reality, are shown to be the analytical tools with which `the eternal question of what constitutes experience' may be pondered. Powell's narrative is one that openly exhibits and plays upon its fictional nature, absorbing and parodying the plastic, visual and dramatic arts as well as the work of other authors. It is this chameleon quality of the text that allows theme, character and situation to be illuminated in a wholly original way, varied yet precise, and which forms the focus of this study. The thesis begins by analyzing Powell's five early novels in order to demonstrate the genesis of his methods. Then the structure of A Dance to the Music of Time is examined showing how the organization of the work constributes towards the meanings. The full effect of Powell's work is gained by the rich intermingling of art forms, the necessary division into separate components for study detracting from its true flavour. The next Temporary Kings, a fine example of the arts working in cumulative combination. This is followed by chapters on the arts as used by Powell considered individually. Key examples, the `presiding ikons' of the text are closely examined with the aim of demonstrating the function of the arts in the narrative. Though numerous minor allusions are also considered, the thesis seeks to be exemplary rather than exhaustive

Author	Laws, Monica Marie
Title	For Everything a Season: The Spiral History in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	Saint Louis University (USA)
Year	1989
Abstract	Anthony Powell recognizes pattern and repetition as an essential aspect in the dance of life; one event inevitably leads to another. Inevitability does not limit individual freedom; it does, however, establish conditions over which one has no control. Powell uses Nicolas Poussin's painting A Dance to the Music of Time as the framework for his own A Dance to the Music of Time. The painting defines pattern as the steps in the course of life in Time and repetition as the continual movement in a cycle. Powell expands Poussin's cyclic pattern to a spiral, because he recognizes that even though individuals progress from spring or childhood to winter or old age only once, people do experience numerous springtimes in one lifetime. His spiral actually becomes a counter-spiral as he traces the changes in British culture from 1914-1970. For Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, the spiral is upward, one of growth and maturation physically, emotionally, and aesthetically. For British culture the spiral is downward, one of decline politically, socially, and aesthetically. Poussin's painting and its several interpretations are the initial focus for an understanding of Powell's counter-spiral. Within the patterns set by Poussin's Seasons and Powell's counter-spiral, the dissertation explores four fictional visual artists who influence the upward progress of the narrator while at the same time reflecting the downward spiral of British culture. The dissertation then analyzes the Seven Deadly Sins tapestries, which function in the novel series as a paradigm of British culture; the embodiment of a particular sin in one or more characters and in society reveal the third aspect of Poussin's cyclic pattern and Powell's counter-spiral. In cyclic theories, the lowest point of decline or death is usually followed by renewal and regeneration. The last focus analyzes Powell's underlying hope for British culture.

Author	Frost, Laurie Anne Adams
Title	Reminiscent Scrutinies: Individual Memory and Social Life in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	Rice University (USA)
Year	1988
Abstract	In The Music of Time, Anthony Powell examines the tension between the internal reality of memory and the external social world in which the self is defined. The twelve volumes are presented as the fictional memoirs of Nicholas Jenkins; Powell's interest is in depicting voluntary memory and the stories we tell to explain who we are. Since Nick is both character and narrator, two philosophies of time are developed. On the one hand, internalized time is depicted; the memories Nick the narrator records are present simultaneously in his mind, and thus Nick remembers the past in terms of the future. But Nick the character functions in external, sequential time. Representing both internal and external concepts of time demands stylistic innovations; the effort is that the work's style is distinguished by its maintenance of chronology and accommodation of interruptions. Furthermore, since he functions as both narrator and protagonist, Nick must be defined socially. The voices of other characters are heard, and a bridge is thus formed between Nick's internal world, his memories, and an external, objective world; and the pleasure of shared experience, the basic impulse for narration, is reaffirmed. Finally, what makes narrative possible is order, seeing patterns in experience, and it is through the agency of memory that we detect patterns in external reality. Patterns are found to be at once imposed by the mind to order information and revealed in experience. These patterns are found on three levels: in language, plot, and characterization. But that patterns are discernible in experience does not mean that Powell is depicting a deterministic world; his characters seem to act as free agents, and the final cause of any episode in a pattern is indeterminable. Those causes that are discerned are those which fit the future effect. There is thus throughout The Music of Time a dynamic quality to Nick's narration: a stress between the power of the past to determine the future and the power of the future to determine the past; and it is through the depiction of individual memory and the patterns of social life that this tension is realized.

Author	Felber, Lynette Lee
Title	Novels Without End: The Interdynamics of Narrative and Ideology in the Romans-Fleuve of Anthony Trollope and Anthony Powell
Degree	PhD
University	University of Wisconsin - Madison (USA)
Year	1987
Abstract	The roman-fleuve (literally "river novel"), a subgenre of the novel, is a multivolume work tracing the history of an individual, a family, or a community. Trollope, dissatisfied with the scope of the Victorian triple-decker, developed one of the first identifiable British examples of the roman-fleuve in his Palliser novels (1864-80). Although Powell streamlined the genre in A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75), the anti-experimental form of his work demonstrates the persistence of nineteenth-century novelistic technique in the conservative strain of the contemporary roman-fleuve. The study of a literary genre, this dissertation is informed by recent theory in narrative, ideology, and historiography. It offers a theoretical definition of the roman-fleuve and examines the interrelations of conservative ideology and conventional narrative in the Palliser novels and The Music of Time. Part One examines the narrative characteristics of the genre in the expositions, "middles", and closures of these works. Unlike highly plotted novels which move from efficient introduction to strong resolution, these narratives are characterized by oblique exposition and diffused closure which, combined with the extensive reiteration and vacillation of their middles, create an arrested development and a dialectical strain in the genre. Part Two analyzes the ideology implicit in the presentation of social change in these works, particularly as evident in the depiction of country estates and parvenus. Trollope's and Powell's romans-fleuves are quasi-historical and, as in any historical form, the emphasis on process conflicts with the imposition of narrative boundaries. The forward movement of the processes of social change, history, and time – the thematic foci of this genre – is obstructed by a conflicted ideology which subverts the narrative progression and thematic resolution of the roman-fleuve. Although the conservative roman-fleuve is in many ways an anomalous throwback to the 19th century, analysis of the conservative strain of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century roman-fleuve contributes not only to research on the evolution and diversity of this genre, but also to an understanding of the dynamics of extended prose fiction.

Author	Crawley, Margaret
Title	Time and Anthony Powell: how Powell handles time in A Dance to the music of Time
Degree	MA
University	Montclair State College (USA)
Year	1987

Author	Gorra, Michael Edward
Title	The English Novel at Mid-Century: Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, Anthony Powell, and Graham Greene
Degree	PhD
University	Stanford University (USA)
Year	1986
Abstract	If, as Georg Lukacs writes, the novel grows out of "the antagonistic duality of soul and world", then the modernists' celebration of the interior life seems to deny that duality by concentrating upon the soul's ability to transform the world. In doing so they bring the novel to a simultaneous fruition and dissolution that parallels that of the liberal society upon which it is based. The novel did not die, but the modernists' successors, with whom this study deals, could neither summon a belief in what Lukacs calls "the adventure of interiority" as an end in itself, nor return to the genre's earlier forms. They are the product of an age in which the "official beliefs", as Orwell wrote, "were dissolving like sandcastles" before the waves of historical change created by the Great War and by modernist thought itself. to these writers, the world seems so powerful as to exclude the soul. Their work depends upon a search for a new way to negotiate the gap between the world and the soul that would allow them to engage both their own limitations of form and of their historical period. Waugh uses his Catholicism to give his characters the soul that his comedy, which treats people as things, would deny them. Henry Green describes the way his characters' isolating individual experience paralyzes their attempts to engage the objective world. Anthony Powell allows his narrator to describe the objective patterns of social life, but uses the conventions of the first person to prevent that narrator from describing the subjective experience of other people. Graham Greene's sense of the power of convention makes all expression of deep emotion seem cliched, and so he tries to use religion as a way to make that emotion something more. Taken together their sense of the individual soul's impotence before the world is homologous to England's long slide from world power at mid-century.

Author	Scott, James Joseph
Title	Nicholas Jenkins's Multiple Roles in Anthony Powell's A Dance to The Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	University of Oregon (USA)
Year	1984
Abstract	Some critics have praised Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time as the most important literary work to appear in English since Joyce's Ulysses, while others have claimed that it does not offer enough substance to justify its length. We can attribute this range of criticism in part to the difficulties which critics have encountered in trying to determine what kind of a work Powell has written. To help determine what kind of a work Powell has written and consequently to help resolve the conflicts described above, this study focuses on the multiple roles of Nicholas Jenkins, Powell's narrator. It is the position of this study that Powell departs from the traditional first-person narrative to create a multi-dimensional character of a type that cannot be found in traditional first-person fictional narratives. The traditional first-person narrative describes a series of events taking place before the narrator commences to tell his story. The narrator can change and grow in his role as participant in the story being told, but he cannot change and grow in his role as narrator because those events which might cause him to change or grow have already taken place before he commences to tell his story. This study takes the position that Powell presents Dance as a story told over a number of years, with the narrator commencing to tell his story before the events described in the latter sections of that story have actually taken place. Put another way, the Nicholas Jenkins who begins to tell the story does not know how it will end. Events will take place after he commences telling his story which will affect how he goes about telling it. As a consequence, Nicholas Jenkins, unlike the narrator of the traditional first-person fiction, changes and grows in his role as narrator, in addition to changing and growing in his role as participant in the events narrated. The study concludes by showing how Powell's creation of a new kind of narrator expands the possibilities of the first-person narrative fictional form.

Author	Colt, Rosemary Mizener
Title	The Ghost Railway: Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and the 1930s
Degree	PhD
University	Brown University (USA)
Year	1984
Abstract	This dissertation looks at A Dance in context of the literary sensibility of the thirties, the period whose influence determines the novel's themes. For instance, the novel reflects the era's concern with the conflict between public and private responsibility. Nick Jenkins, Powell's narrator, wonders whether to commit himself to action when the result is unpredictable, a common dilemma in a decade when writers seeking commitment, found art and politics incompatible by the decade's end. Nick's distrust of the imagination and reliance on intuitive observation are his response to the idea of art as a social instrument. Powell's early novels reflect a dissatisfaction with the missionary sensibility of the thirties which is never fully articulated. But in A Dance, the novelist finds his voice, and constructs, a narrative which shows his skill at manifesting attitude in character. Nick's disinterested cataloguing of behavior replaces the transforming imagination which he considers self-defeating. Later, the analogy between the war and Nick's age reflects the impact of history on behavior upon which he relies. The narrator defines courage as self-effacement, while all around him, men abuse power for self-advancement. In the final trilogy, Powell's thirties' sensibility is revealed again as distrust of the imagination, as he unites earlier themes in the character of X Trapnel. The dangers of "romantic" egoism weigh on Nick's mind as he ponders the significance of his times for men and women like himself. The novel is a social chronicle, and reading it in its proper context reveals that Powell is more than a novelist of manners: his meditation on these years embodies history's relation to his generation as thoroughly as any one of his contemporaries has done.

Author	Hopley, Claire Ann Harris
Title	Wars and Rumors of Wars: The English Novel and the Second World War
Degree	PhD
University	University of Massachusetts (USA)
Year	1983
Abstract	English novelists who have written about their experience of the Second World War have worked in the shadow of those who wrote about the First World War. As a generation they grew up feeling that the earlier war had exposed the inadequacy of late-Victorian and Edwardian civilization, and that therefore their own generation had a special responsibility to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The occurrence of the Second World War, though expected, was, then, a mark of failure. Moreover, for writers it imposed the burden of creating a literature comparable in strength to that produced by those who had fought in the earlier war. English novels about the Second World War have not, however, concentrated on the experience of battle. Rather, they have been about English society and twentieth-century history and have showed the effects of these on the moral and intellectual growth of a group of characters. The acquisition and use of power has been an important theme in both novels about the war and also in those written afterwards and concerned with the questions about evil which it raised. Studies of the work of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and CP Snow, all of whom wrote before and after the war, show the variety in their treatment of it, yet each locates its sources in human personality. Orwell suspected that the love of power and its corollary, the love of powerlessness, were becoming endemic and that totalitarianism and war were the inevitable results. Waugh found the Christian belief in a fallen world sufficient explanation for the horrors of the twentieth century as well as a guide for behavior. Powell's image of life as a dance to the music of time accepts war as a phase of history, while Snow suggests that destructiveness is an inherent human quality against which constant efforts must be made. These and other writers publishing after the war used realist techniques or other popular forms, hoping to make their commentaries on war available to as large an audience as possible.

Author	De Havilland, PJW
Title	A Reading of Anthony Powell's Sequence Novel A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	University of Exeter (UK)
Year	1983
Abstract	This paper first considers Anthony Powell's early novel Afternoon Men The manner in which this short work forms into a succession of scenes is noted, and contrasted with A Dance to the Music of Time. The large sequence novel is also constructed from a stream of scenes, but these are closely interconnected. A general account of the sequence indicates the problems of coherence inherent in a work which covers a lifetime of observation and experience and which contains more than five hundred characters. The novel series is a web of stories woven around the central narrator Nick Jenkins, an observer at the heart of a large community who draws the diversity of his observation into a whole by means of reflection which ranges freely across time independently of the period described. This can be seen in The Kindly Ones where by looking 'outwards' to other people and to society, Jenkins inevitably looks 'inwards' to himself. While mostly interested in the lives of others, the narrator's retrospect is not merely to record the past, but to relive past experience, to place and understand it in relation to other experiences which go to make up the self. Time in the series of volumes is fluid and affirms two perspectives. The first is chronological; the progression of events in sequence, the following of character's lives and the examination of change as the years pass. The second is the narrator's more persona1 feeling for the evolution of experience, for human time.

Author	Beadle, JJ
Title	Anthony Powell and the Conversational Novel Form: Observations on the Early ...
Degree	MPhil
University	University of Oxford (UK)
Year	1981

Author	Towsner, Rita Katz
Title	Balance in Anthony Powell's The Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	Trinity College [Which one - Ed]
Year	1980

Author	Dardis, Thomas Anthony
Title	Some Time In The Sun: The Hollywood Years of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley and James Agee
Degree	PhD
University	Columbia University (USA)
Year	1980

Author	Meixner, Susan Turnquist
Title	Partisan Politics and the Sequence Novels of Evelyn Waugh, CP Snow and Anthony Powell
Degree	PhD
University	University of Kansas (USA)
Year	1979
Abstract	One of the Twentieth Century novelist's chief tasks has been to come to terms with the political realities of his age. In England the novelist has had to understand Great Britain's changing role in world politics and the corresponding shifts within the English power structure. The subtle changes in England's establishment have reflected basic upheavals in all parts of English life, and fiction has been a primary means for recording, understanding, and evaluating the influence of these changes on individual fate, and on the social order itself. The primary aim of this study is to examine the effects of the political attitudes of Evelyn Waugh, CP Snow, and Anthony Powell on their sequence novels Sword of Honour, Strangers and Brothers, and A Dance to the Music of Time. The political attitudes of the authors play a major, if not always explicit, role in these novels, and taken together, they give a panoramic view of British society from the three major political viewpoints in Twentieth Century England. Evelyn Waugh, CP Snow, and Anthony Powell write about the same society and analyze the same phenomena occurring in that society. Each sees an England shifting the identity of its ruling class and changing the assumptions underlying a traditional way of life. Each sees a decline in the power of the old aristocracy, and the rise of a class of New Men who are destined to govern England in the future. The major similarity linking the three writers, however, is that each is a moralist, and each ultimately feels called upon to judge his society and the direction in which it is moving. Each writer uses his political attitudes as a basis for the judgment he eventually makes. Because their political attitudes differ, however, the novelists employ differing criteria in making their judgments, and each accordingly comes to a different evaluation of the direction in which England is moving. Chapter I of this study, introductory in nature, examines the ways in which the novels of Waugh, Snow, and Powell are political, and the political affiliations of the three novelists: Evelyn Waugh – Tory, CP Snow – Labourite, and Anthony Powell – Liberal. In this chapter the major political themes of the novelists are also identified. Chapter II gives a brief survey of some of the historical meanings attached to the political labels, and particular party attitudes towards class, the New Men, the aristocracy, private property, and the cult of the expert are examined. The remaining chapters explore, in order, the influence of partisan politics on each of the novel sequences. Chapter III discusses the difficulties Guy Crouchback must face in adjusting to a world abandoning Tory values. Guy's final decisions to live in the Lesser House on the Crouchback family estate and to adopt Virginia's illegitimate child are examined as Tory choices. Guy's private act of charity towards the child establishes his allegiance to his father's religious faith, and his return to the estate reaffirms his connection with England's Tory traditions. Chapter IV examines Lewis Eliot's establishment of a place for himself as a member of Britain's governing class. Snow's position as a Labour apologist is explored through a discussion of Eliot's belief that English society is making progress towards becoming a "good society". This is primarily evident in Snow's presentation of the decline of an elite based on the outmoded values of land and birth in favor of an aristocracy based on ability and expertise. In Chapter V Nick Jenkins's faith in tolerance and flexibility as the qualities most important for a successful life in society is examined as an outcome of his Liberal attitude. The Liberal principles underlying Nick's belief that tolerance of all ideologies is essential for a sane life become clear when he finds it necessary to take a position and make a value judgment on his society. Each of the three novelists in this study judges individuals by their ability to understand and implement certain political principles. Each novelist evaluates the direction in which his society is moving; each is deeply concerned with the emergence of a new elite, the New Men, and each novelist bases his judgment in a political attitude. This study is an examination of the ways in which the partisan political attitudes of the novelists come to influence their fiction, and the ways in which it determines the character of the judgments the novelists eventually make on men and society.

Author	Lindemann, Michael Desmond
Title	'Classical Projections': Narrative Technique in the Novels of Anthony Powell, with Particular Reference to A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	University of The Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa )
Year	1979

Author	Morrison, Cynthia Blundell
Title	"I'm leading now": the argument for Widmerpool as the central character of A Dance To The Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	North Texas State University (USA)
Year	1979

Author	Duffy, Joseph
Title	The concept of time in Anthony Powell's novel-sequence A Dance To The Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	University of Regina (Canada)
Year	1979

Author	Tucker, AJ
Title	A Dance to the Music of Time and the Earlier Novels of Anthony Powell
Degree	MA
University	University of Wales (UK)
Year	1975

Author	Price, Ann
Title	Forms of tension in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	Kansas State University (USA)
Year	1975

Author	Riley, John James
Title	Gentlemen at Arms: A Comparison of the War Trilogies of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh
Degree	PhD
University	Tufts University (USA)
Year	1973

Author	White, Mary Ray
Title	Anthony Powell: Ten Volumes of The Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	Cornell University (USA)
Year	1973

Author	Kamera, Willy David
Title	A Descriptive Index of the Characters in Anthony Powell's Music of Time
University	Cornell University (USA)
Year	1973

Author	Jordan, Ann Baxley
Title	The female stereotype in Anthony Powell's The Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	Winthrop College (USA)
Year	1973

Author	Walsh, John Eugene
Title	Painting in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	University of Texas at Arlington (USA)
Year	1973

Author	Stanton, Lillian
Title	Art in the Dance: A Study of the Use of the Fine Arts tn Anthony Powell's A Dance to The Music of Time
University	University of Notre Dame (USA)
Year	1973

Author	Cant, Peter
Title	Time as an element of structure in the novels of Anthony Powell
Degree	MA
University	Concordia University (Canada)
Year	1970

Author	Mcleod, Dan D
Title	The Art of Anthony Powell
Degree	PhD
University	Claremont Graduate School (USA)
Year	1969

Author	Gutierrez, Donald Kenneth
Title	A Critical Study of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
University	University of California, Los Angeles (USA)
Year	1969

Author	Gaspeny, Michael George
Title	The significance of Nicholas Jenkins in Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music of Time
Degree	MA
University	University of Richmond (USA)
Year	1969

Author	Wight, Marjorie
Title	An analysis of selected British novelists between 1945 and 1966, and their critics
Degree	PhD
University	University of Southern California (USA)
Year	1968

Author	Bjornson, Barbara Ann
Title	An examination of narrative strategy in A la recherche du temps perdu and A Dance To The Music of Time
Degree	PhD
University	University of Washington (USA)
Year	1968

Author	Rowan, Terence Christopher.
Title	A study of Nicholas Jenkins and Kenneth Widmerpool related to the downfall of British upper society in A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Degree	MA
University	St. John's University (USA)
Year	1968

Author	Ottervik, Eric Van Tine
Title	The multiple-novel in contemporary British fiction
Degree	PhD
University	University of Pittsburgh, (USA)
Year	1967

Author	Lee, James Ward
Title	The Novels of Anthony Powell
Degree	PhD
University	Auburn University (USA)
Year	1964

Author	Morris, Robert K
Title	The Early Novels of Anthony Powell: A Thematic Study
Degree	PhD
University	The University of Wisconsin – Madison (USA)
Year	1964

Author	Herring, Henry Dunham
Title	Reactions against scientific determinism in the novels of Anthony Powell and Saul Bellow
Degree	MA
University	University of South Carolina (USA)
Year	1963