The historical imagination in the English Renaissance, studied in Spenser and Milton

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Toronto: the manuscript, 1950. — 334 p.Thesis subrcitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophyin the University of Toronto.This study has arisen from an Interest in a contemporary phenomenon—the extraordinary preoccupation of modern man with time and history. It Is a concern reflected everywhere in modern thought and art-In the production and the popularity of such grand syntheses and patternings of history as those of Spengler and Toynbee and in the historical materialism of the Marxists, in the rise of the history of ideas to its place of dominance in scholarship and the return of a prophotic Intororotation and Judgement of histoiry in such theological writings as those of Berdyaev and Marjtain, Charles Ailliaroc and Tlilich; and finally in the persistent endeavoiir of modern creative artiats to define and express a sense of the pest end a sense of their own time. This thesis represents a late stage in the development of historlcal consciousness; it deals with an early phase In the same process.