Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis seeks to explore the influence exerted by the French philosopher Henri Bergson on early modern British literature--from about 1895-1930. That Bergson played a role in the development of the innovations which occurred in the imaginative literature of this period is widely acknowledged. What is less clearly defined is the nature and extent of his influence; this is the problem approached by this study. ;Chapter I provides a discussion and definition of influence. It also indicates how Bergson may be linked to the major British writers whose works are examined in the study. Chapter II discusses Bergson's time theory. It focuses on his concepts of la duree and the unending flux of existence. Chapter III deals with Bergson's concept of memory. It specifically concentrates on the distinction he draws between voluntary and involuntary event memory. Chapter IV looks at Bergson's contributions to the new notion of self which developed at the beginning of this century. His emphasis on the inner world and on the evolving multiple layers of self is particularly important. Bergson's notion of comedy as arising from man's likeness to a machine provides the focus for Chapter V. Chapter VI examines Bergson's contributions to the aesthetic thought of the day. His view of art as an intuitive experience is most significant here. The works of Shaw, Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Joyce provide the major foci for Chapters II-V. Chapter VI--Aesthetics--examines Bergson's impact on the literary thinkers of the period and thus looks at T. E. Hulme and the Imagists, J. M. Murry, Percy Wyndham Lewis, and Bloomsbury as well as Woolf and Eliot. The study's conclusion explains why Bergson disappeared from prominence after about 1930 and also maintains that his influence lingers on in later works through the indirect agency of the writers he touched early in the century