Date of Award

1968

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

First Advisor

Dr. Bob Riley

Second Advisor

Ms. Martha Black

Third Advisor

Ms. Fay Holiman

Abstract

Katherine Anne Porter is the internationally known novelist and short story writer who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her work, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Miss Porter, a near octogenarian from Texas, has done a regional type story with settings in Southwestern United States, Mexico, Central Europe (Germany) and the Old South.

Her life parallels her work in many instances, to a minor degree, but both confront good and evil in situations and episodes, and her works and philosophies are developed by the literary and philosophical media of idealism and naturalism. Her honesty forces her to search for the truth in each situation and episode, so that she will not be self-deceived into fantasy and delusion.

The aim of this work is to analyze the search for the reality and the struggles in the lives of Miss Porter and her characters, as they confront good and evil, through the media of idealism and naturalism and to show in her writings how the personalities under psychological observations develop and adjust to situations through benign and malignant ego-defense mechanisms.

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