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.
Recommended Citation
Wolber, Frances Cantrell, "The Conflict of Idealism and Naturalism in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter: Fiction in Search of Reality" (1968). OBU Graduate Theses. 32.
https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/grad_theses/32