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Lente, Sandra van. "Cultural exchange in selected contemporary British novels." Doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Philosophische Fakultät II, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/17133.
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In dieser Dissertation werden die Repräsentationen von Kulturtransfer in zeitgenössischen britischen Romanen untersucht (Monica Ali: Brick Lane (2003), Nadeem Aslam: Maps For Lost Lovers (2004), Gautam Malkani: Londonstani (2007) und Maggie Gee: The White Family (2002)). Für die Analyse der Begegnungen und Kulturtransferprozesse werden narratologische Analysekategorien mit denen der Kulturtransferanalyse verknüpft. Neben den textimmanenten Aspekten werden außerdem die Produktions- und Rezeptionskontexte der Romane mitberücksichtigt. Dazu gehören u.a. auch das Buchmarketing und Buchumschlagdesign sowie Rezensionen und öffentliche Reaktionen auf die Romane. Mit diesem Instrumentarium werden z.B. folgende Fragen untersucht: Wie werden Begegnungen und Austauschprozesse repräsentiert und bewertet? Welche Gründe für Aneignung oder Abschottung werden formuliert? In diesem Kontext konzentriert sich die Arbeit auf die Repräsentation von Mediatorinnen und Mediatoren, Kontaktzonen und -situationen, Machtstrukturen sowie Selektions- und Ablehnungsprozesse. Außerdem wird untersucht, mit welchen ästhetischen Mitteln die Austauschprozesse gestaltet werden, beispielsweise durch die Untersuchung der Plotmuster und der Charakterisierungen auf Stereotype hin. und welche Effekte dies bewirkt. Die Analysen haben ergeben, dass Kulturtransfer als erstrebenswert bewertet wird. Gleichzeitig findet aber oft nur Assimilierung statt und kein reziproker Austausch auf Augenhöhe. Die ausgewählten Romane setzen sich vorwiegend mit Hindernissen des interkulturellen Austauschs auseinander. Besonders häufig werden in diesem Kontext Gründe wie mangelnde Bereitschaft, mangelnde Bildung und extremistische (religiöse) Ansichten der Einwandererfamilien angeführt. Die Romane verstetigen Stereotype, die dem Lesepublikum bereits aus vielen Massenmedien vertraut sind, u.a. durch entwicklungsresistente Charaktere, typisiert als ungebildete und unverbesserliche Migranten, die Parallelgesellschaften entwerfen.This thesis analyses representations of cultural exchange in contemporary British novels in the context of migration and the British literary field. It offers a multilayered approach: the combination of cultural exchange theory and its categories with narratological tools do justice to the aesthetic side of the novels as well as their socio-political and historical contexts that are particularly relevant for novels dealing with migration. Cultural exchange theory analyses appropriation and transformation processes, i.e. how the concepts, cultural practices as well as representations change when they are transferred into a different cultural context. Furthermore, this thesis takes into consideration that all novels exist as material objects within a literary field that is affected by editors, marketing people, reviewers, and other agents. The results support the following theses: Contact and exchange are implicitly and explicitly depicted as something positive, with two of the novels emphasising the virtues of selective appropriation. However, the exchange processes mainly work in one direction only and contact between (British) Asian and (white) British characters is limited. The blame for this is often put on the immigrants and their families. The selected texts focus on obstacles and conflicts in exchange processes without offering solutions to the conflicts. In this context, religion or religious fervour along with a lack of education are most often depicted as the main obstacle for reciprocal cultural exchange. The aesthetic means employed are analysed as well as their effects, e.g. whether form and content reinforce each other or produce contradictions. Finally, the thesis shows which novels deconstruct and contradict existing stereotypes and which ones are complicit in reproducing them. Primary texts: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) and Maggie Gee’s The White Family (2002).
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Fang, Chih-hui. "Lesbian identity in British and Taiwanese contemporary novels." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.410809.
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Snider, Caleb. "Almost an Englishman: Black and British Identities in Three Contemporary British Novels." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28830.
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This project describes the work of three contemporary British novelists as they explore the possibility of self-identifying as black and British in contemporary Britain, despite the prevalence of racist attitudes that hold that these two identities are mutually exclusive. The three novels examined -- The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Brick Lane by Monica Ali -- present black protagonists who self-identify as British. While other characters in the novels either conform to assimilationist or diasporic models of identity, where the subject seeks to expunge all "black" characteristics in favour of conforming to stereotypical "white" cultural norms, or retreat from "white" characteristics into an essentialized version of the values of their "home" countries, Karim, Irie, and Nazneen establish spaces for themselves within British society that allow them to try on different identities. By acknowledging the variability of identity, all three protagonists are able to self-identify as being both black and British.
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Majed, Hasan. "Islam and Muslim identities in four contemporary British novels." Thesis, University of Sunderland, 2012. http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/3739/.
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The aim of the dissertation is to explore how Islam is depicted and Muslim identities are constructed in four representative works of contemporary British fiction: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma, and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is also discussed in terms of its crucial role in fostering what some Muslims might consider polemical and stereotypical positions in writing about Islam. The term ‘Islamic postcolonialism’ provides the theoretical underpinning to the thesis. Islamic postcolonialism is a theoretical perspective that combines two components which have up until now existed in a state of tension. As a secular theory, postcolonialism has notably failed to account for Muslim priorities; it has, for instance, had severe problems critiquing the anti-Islam polemics of The Satanic Verses, as is evidenced by Edward Said’s support for Rushdie, in spite of his criticism of the stereotypical representation of Islam and Muslims in the West. Islamic postcolonialism applies the anti-colonial resistant methodology of postcolonialism from a Muslim perspective, exploring the continuance of colonial discourse in part of the contemporary western writing about Islam and Muslims. Applying Islamic postcolonialism to the novels in question, the thesis tests the following questions: 1. How are Islam and Muslims depicted in the novels discussed? 2. Is the depiction of Islam similar to, and if so in what ways, its depiction in the literature of the colonial period? 3. Is there a connection between the writer’s personal 2 religious commitment and the image of Islam and Muslims he/she inscribes in the novel? The four novels are then classified according to three categories: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane depict Islam and Muslims stereotypically, from a partially colonial perspective. Secondly, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma adopts a mixed colonial and postcolonial depiction of Islam and Muslims. While it depicts the centrality of Islam in a Muslim society (Hima, Jordan) stereotypically, the novel appears more sympathetic in imaging Islam in England under the conditions of the personal and the marginal. Thirdly, Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret is the one text that complies with an Islamic postcolonial perspective. The failure of secularism and re-emergence of Islam in the Arab world is, Waïl Hassan contends, the background to the achievement of Aboulela’s fiction. Her image of Islam and Muslims is unique in British fiction as it provides a new depiction of these categories from the standpoint of a more authentic Muslim voice. Minaret, it is argued, is an Islamic postcolonial novel both because it celebrates Islam, and because Najwa adopts Islam as her first identity in metropolitan London, which once represented the colonial centre from which her native Sudan was colonised.
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Henesy, Megan Louise. "Novels of precarity : neoliberal counternarratives in contemporary British women's fiction." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2016. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/413764/.
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This thesis argues that there isa growing canon of contemporary women’s literature that is interested in exploring and reimagingthe ‘capitalist fraying’1 of conventional good-life fantasies in contemporary Britain. By primarily using the theories of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed as a framework for understanding how precarity can be considered from an affective standpoint, this thesis will study how the chosen authors present British neoliberal society as an inherently precarious environment. The thesis begins by discussing the evolution of the neologism ‘precarity’ from a term used to describe the shifting socioeconomic environment at the turn of the millennium, to one utilised across a range of disciplines to broadly describe the affective experience of living and working under neoliberal capitalism. In the first chapter, the thesis will explore how Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World presents contemporary Britain as an exclusionary environment epitomised by the non-‐place at the centre of its interweaving narratives: the Global Hotel. The second chapter discusses Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog, a novel which utilises the genre of detective fiction to explore two time frames that bookend the age of neoliberal ideology, the 1970s and the present day. The third chapter will study how Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black utilises gothic tropes to display a fractured contemporary Britain, which teeters on the edge of social and environmental ruin. The thesis aims to demonstrate that these writers, in challenging the traditional narratives of the good life fantasy, are creating works that present a counternarrative to neoliberalism.
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Petty, Sue. "Working-class women and contemporary British literature." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2009. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/5441.
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This thesis involves a class-based literary criticism of working-class women s writing. I particularly focus on a selection of novels by three working-class women writers - Livi Michael, Caeia March and Joan Riley. Their work emerged in the 1980s, the era of Thatcherism, which is a definitive period in British history that spawned a renaissance of working-class literature. In my readings of the novels I look at three specific aspects of identity: gender, sexuality and race with the intersection of social class, to examine how issues of economic positioning impinge further on the experience of respectively being a woman, a lesbian and a black woman in contemporary British society. I also appropriate various feminist theories to argue for the continued relevance of social class in structuring women s lives in late capitalism. Working-class writing in general, and working-class women s writing in particular, has historically been under-represented in academic study, so that by highlighting the work of these three lesser known writers, and by indicating that they are worthy of study, this thesis is also complicit in an act of feminist historiography.
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Cao, L. "Within the archive : cultural memory and historical representation in four contemporary British novels." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.597278.
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This study examines two categories of contemporary British historical fiction. One category is historical fiction that aims at recuperating or revitalizing the English literary heritage through ventriloquism and pastiche. The other is the closely related category of postcolonial rewriting of the histories of the marginalized or the silenced, which poses a challenge to the canon. Four novels have been chosen as examples: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987); Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Marina Warner’s Indigo or, Mapping the Waters (1992). Although these two categories at first sight seem opposed as far as their ideological and cultural agendas are concerned, they share thematic similarities, they question and re-vision received versions of history, and they make similar use of intertextuality (and sometimes of pastiche) to work with or against “the archive” in their confrontation with an interpretation of the past. They combine to suggest that accepted forms of historical construction are unreliable, and that both the possibility and the need exist for literature to intervene when it comes to the representation of historical knowledge and cultural memory. Chapter 1 examines the conditions for contemporary interest in both history and the historical novel, contextualizing current debates about the uses of the past in contemporary historical fiction and defining the concept of “the archive”. Chapter 2 discusses Possession, a novel which both evokes and appropriates a specific literary archive and modes of representation - that of Victorian poetry and fiction - while interrogating textual reliability. Chapter 3 analyses Ackroyd’s Chatterton, a novel that in many ways parallels Possession’s concern with the aesthetics of the past. Such issues as the iterability of history, the role of pastiche and forgery in the reinvention of the past (and therefore in the formation of the literary canon) will be the foci of discussion. Chapter 4 shifts the study to the category of postcolonial rewriting. It examines Wide Sargasso Sea as a counter-text to Jane Eyre, focusing on the voice of the silenced and the subaltern and on the in-between subjectivity of the Creole woman. Chapter 5 discusses Warner’s retrieval of the other side of colonial memory in Indigo - an attempt to rewrite Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The afterword reflects on the range and variety of recent fictional rewritings of cultural memory and historical representation in relation to the role that historical novel plays in contributing to the ways in which a culture conceives of itself through fiction.
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Bowen, Deborah. "Mimesis, magic, manipulation: A study of the photograph in contemporary British and Canadian novels." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6007.
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The photograph is of interest to the writer because it is uniquely a product both of the realm of objective, physical reality and of the realm of artifice. Its ambiguous status as the physical emanation of a past referent endows it with an uneasy authority. It appears to offer assurances of identity and clarity; at the same time, it undermines the attempt to control experience by demonstrating that to freeze time and space is to render them obsolete. Thus the photograph can be seen as a metaphor for the life-giving and death-dealing enterprise of writing fictions. Moreover, because the photograph is a reflection of the past, private or public, a comparison of the use made of photographic images in the fictions of two different cultures, one older, one newer, may reveal differences in aesthetic between those two cultures. A theoretical dialectic for exploring the use made of the photograph in contemporary British and Canadian fiction can be constructed by comparing the thesis of Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977) with that of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1980). Sontag is concerned with the camera as an instrument of power which victimizes its subjects; she sees the text as necessary to contextualize the image according to its function in time. Barthes understands the photograph's fragmentariness as potentially revelatory, and text as parasitic upon image. Where the Sontagian model emphasizes narrative contextualization and the photographer/writer as wielder of power, the Barthean model emphasizes a vertical hermeneutic of epiphanies and the spectator/reader as creator of meaning. A look at several contemporary British novelists who use photographic imagery (Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Martin Amis, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Anita Brookner, Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie) suggests that these writers tend towards an ironical distancing of the photography, which is seen as parodic of traditional mimesis. Such novelists thus ascribe to and yet undermine Sontag's concern with narrative control. A number of contemporary Canadian writers (for instance, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Timothy Findley, Norman Levine, Diane Schoemperlen, Janette Turner Hospital, Michael Ondaatje) find within the photograph a representational magic that transcends boundaries of spatial and temporal logic. They share Barthes' belief in the intransigent value of appearances. An examination of these different writers' use of the photographic image thus provides a commentary upon their various understandings of the real, the fictive, and the relationship between the two.
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van, Lente Sandra Verfasser], Gesa [Akademischer Betreuer] Stedman, and Jana [Akademischer Betreuer] [Gohrisch. "Cultural exchange in selected contemporary British novels / Sandra van Lente. Gutachter: Gesa Stedman ; Jana Gohrisch." Berlin : Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Philosophische Fakultät II, 2015. http://d-nb.info/1067484868/34.
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Lente, Sandra van [Verfasser], Gesa Akademischer Betreuer] Stedman, and Jana [Akademischer Betreuer] [Gohrisch. "Cultural exchange in selected contemporary British novels / Sandra van Lente. Gutachter: Gesa Stedman ; Jana Gohrisch." Berlin : Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Philosophische Fakultät II, 2015. http://d-nb.info/1067484868/34.
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Davies, Ben. "Exceptional intercourse : sex, time and space in contemporary novels by male British and American writers." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2582.
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This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.
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Matschi, Alexander Franz [Verfasser]. "Narrating Space and Motion in Contemporary Asian British Novels: A Cultural Narratology of Motion / Alexander Franz Matschi." Gießen : Universitätsbibliothek, 2016. http://d-nb.info/1112909958/34.
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Lewis, Abby N. "“It could have happened to any of you”: Post-Wounded Women in Three Contemporary Feminist Dystopian Novels." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2021. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3883.
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My goal for this thesis is to investigate the concept of (mis)labeling female protagonists in contemporary British fiction as mentally ill—historically labeled as madness—when subjected to traumatic events. The female protagonists in two novels by Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2018) and Blue Ticket (2020), and Jenni Fagan’s 2012 novel The Panopticon, are raised in environments steeped in trauma and strict, hegemonic structures that actively work to control and mold their identities. In The Panopticon, this system is called “the experiment”; in The Water Cure, it is personified by the character King and those who follow him; and in Blue Ticket, it is the social structure as a whole reflected in the character of Doctor A. To simply label these novels’ woman protagonists as ill would be to ignore that their behavior is not mental illness but in fact rational behavior produced by the traumatic dystopian environments.
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Lau, Hor-ying Esther. "The migrant experience, identity politics, and representation in postcolonial London : contemporary British Novels by Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2008. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B39634309.
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Johnston, Jennifer H. "Exploring Queer Possibilities in Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1383575341.
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Leblond, Diane. "Optiques de la fiction. Pour une analyse des dispositifs visuels de quatre romans britanniques contemporains : Time's arrow de Martin Amis, Gut Symmetries de Jeanette Winterson, Cloud Atlas de David Mitchell, Clear de Nicola Barker." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016USPCC251/document.
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À l’aube du XXIe siècle, la fiction britannique se trouve aux prises avec des représentations conflictuelles du voir. Inscrite dans le contexte du « tournant visuel », elle rend compte de la place prépondérante que les technologies et médias visuels occupent dans l’espace culturel. Dans le même temps, elle entre en dialogue avec un discours anxieux, qui met en avant l’idée d’une crise du visuel. Privilégié pendant des siècles comme le plus intellectuel et le plus noble des sens, le voir semble devenu l’un des lieux où s’orchestrent la manipulation et le contrôle des citoyens, surveillés et exposés au spectacle du capitalisme tardif. Faisant état de ces inquiétudes, la fiction élabore une poétique et un imaginaire de l’optique dans lesquels un sens trouve cependant à se construire. Contre l’exercice d’une autorité visuelle supposée absolue, elle produit des dispositifs dont le fonctionnement subvertit les processus d’assujettissement visuel, et invente de nouvelles pratiques de subjectivation. Ce travail implique un changement de paradigme dans notre appréhension du voir. À la confrontation dichotomique d’un sujet qui voit et d’un objet visible, notre corpus substitue des scènes de rencontre, dans lesquelles le regard se fait réciproque. L’imaginaire épistémologique qui associait la perception visuelle à une forme de connaissance, et la concevait ainsi comme un processus d’appropriation, laisse alors place à une conception politique et éthique du voir, selon laquelle le sujet émerge sous le regard de semblables dont il est, immédiatement, responsable. Ainsi voir c’est toujours s’offrir au regard de l’autre, et prendre le risque que l’échange prenne un tour inattendu, que la reconnaissance dérape. Cette appréhension de l’expérience visuelle, qui compose avec ses imperfections et envisage le lien réciproque par lequel le sujet et le sens émergent, nous engage à envisager une phénoménologie pragmatique de la lectureAt the turn of the 21st century, British fiction finds itself negotiating conflicting perceptions of vision. In the context of the “visual turn,” it reflects the increasingly influential role that visual technologies and media play in today’s cultural landscape. At the same time, it addresses anxious accounts of what is often presented as a crisis of the visual. For centuries vision was celebrated as the most intellectual of the senses; today, however, it is more often presented as a key component in practices of manipulation and control. Far from standing as a master of the visible world, the seeing subject appears as subjugated, living as he does under constant surveillance, and among the simulacra of the late capitalist spectacle. While taking such concerns into account, contemporary fiction creates optical dispositives that subvert the mechanisms of visual subjectification, and pave the way for new practices of subjectivation. This calls for a shift in the paradigms used to delineate the workings of vision. The novels we analyse here leave behind optical models defined by the binary separation between seeing and seen, subject and object. What they create instead are visual encounters in which one pair of eyes necessarily meets another. The epistemological understanding of visual perception as a vehicle of knowledge is replaced by a political and ethical interpretation of vision: the seeing subject emerges under the gaze of others, whom he acknowledges as his responsibility. In seeing therefore we run the risk that the encounter might go awry, that recognition might turn into misrecognition. This conception of visual experience emphasises the reciprocal structures of discourse and perception within which subjects and meanings emerge, but also reckons with the imperfections inherent in any interactive exchange between seeing and speaking subjects. It suggests that we engage with the phenomenology of reading through the pragmatics of discourse
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Edwards, Caroline. "Fictions of the not yet : time and the contemporary British novel." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.546269.
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Nunius, Sabine. "Coping with difference new approaches in the contemporary British novel (2000 - 2006)." Berlin Münster Lit, 2009. http://d-nb.info/996663215/04.
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Ford, Anna Jane. "Endangered bodies : woman and nature in the contemporary British novel by women writers." Thesis, Brunel University, 2004. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/5793.
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Criticism that involves the linkage of the terms ‘environment’ and ‘literature’, or ‘ecocriticism’, has focused largely on texts such as nature writing or on fiction that is set in rural or wilderness settings. This project attempts to widen the scope of ecocriticism by analysing the contemporary British novel, in which nature conceived in such stereotypical ways is largely absent. However, in my analysis of the fifteen texts selected here, I demonstrate that British women writers employ new discursive constructions of nature in order to contest deterministic formulations that subjugate both women and nature. My focus on female textual bodies enables me to explore representations of the fluid interfaces of nature and culture. In my analysis of novels from an environmental standpoint, `environment' is reconceived to refer to `where we live, work, and play' and may include not only the countryside and urban nature, but also the female body itself. Thus, the nature of my title is an inclusive term that includes contemporary discourses of nature employed by the sciences of biomedicine, genetics and technology. This project examines the ecofeminist premise that discourses of mastery not only affect subjugated others such as women, animals and others, but also influence the treatment of the natural environment. Analysing novels that employ forms of embodiment that foreground extreme bodily conditions such as pregnancy, monstrosity and death, I employ the theoretical constructs of Mikhail Bakhtin (the grotesque body, carnivalisation and dialogism) and Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection as tools of analysis to provide a new conception of ecological bodies. Novelists such as Jeanette Winterson, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Margaret Drabble, Kathy Lette and Eva Figes provide a wide range of viewpoints from which to gather evidence of the insistence of the recurring trope of the endangered body within the troubled landscape of contemporary Britain.
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Tyler, Natalie Christine Hawthorne. "Communities of last resort : representations of the elderly in the contemporary British novel /." The Ohio State University, 1993. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487844105977346.
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Abdulwahab, Hussain. "The return to Darwin in the contemporary British novel : an evolutionary response to postmodernism and social constructivism." Thesis, Brunel University, 2018. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/17034.
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Arguably, the impact of Darwinism on the novel is an indispensable part of the study of English literature. However, with regard to such literary study there is an ongoing aversion towards approaching Darwin outside the confines of his contemporaneous Victorian setting. This thesis explores what remains an extremely under-represented area of current scholarship; namely, the active status of Darwinism as an influence upon contemporary novelists. To address this gap, this study starts by conducting textual and comparative analyses of a representative selection of contemporary British novels, a literary field that, since 1990, has featured significant authors who have found in Darwin a source of intellectual and literary inspiration. The aim is to argue that Darwin's classic texts, and more recent incarnations of his theory such as Sociobiology, are deployed as a materialist discourse, used to subvert various problematic assumptions in the declining Postmodernist philosophy, the previously dominant theoretical paradigm. For novelists including Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt and Jenny Diski, Darwinism provides the tools to define human nature in an oppositional manner to the Social Constructivism which reduces the human to a blank slate ready for society's dictation. A universal human nature can be seen manifested in biological phenomena including competition, altruism, reproduction and aggression. The treacherous territory of biological determinism is still present, yet the desire to experiment is carried forward by McEwan in Enduring Love and Saturday into the realm of challenging traditional religion. In a more nuanced manner, Jim Crace's Being Dead manages to create a wholly naturalistic narrative of death. Finally, reinstating alterative meta-narratives is a practice that comes fully into its own in contemporary renditions of history. Byatt's Neo-Victorian novels, Possession and Morpho Eugenia, exhibit faith in knowing the past as if it were an evolutionary process of accumulated changes. Moreover, Diski's serio-ironic Monkey's Uncle is focused on how the present is haunted by the past in the form of immortal DNA coils. This study analyses the texts in a manner suggesting a paradigm shift in literary scholarship, where Darwin is no longer seen as simply an ideological threat. As the sciences continue to become more hermeneutically enigmatic, and as literature seems embedded in an elitist Postmodernist trajectory, there is now huge democratic potential in the New Darwinian Novel which invites the everyman of today to participate in the controversies of both disciplines.
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Crouch, Kristin Ann. "Shared experience theatre: exploring the boundaries of performance." The Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1054738772.
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Emmens, Heather. "Domestications and Disruptions: Lesbian Identities in Television Adaptations of Contemporary British Novels." Thesis, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1974/5352.
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The first decade of this century marked a moment of hypervisibility for lesbians and bisexual women on British television. During this time, however, lesbian hypervisibility was coded repeatedly as hyperfemininity. When the BBC and ITV adapted Sarah Waters’s novels for television, how, I ask, did the screen versions balance the demands of pop visual culture with the novels’ complex, unconventional – and in some cases subversive – representations of lesbianism? I pursue this question with an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from queer and feminist theories, cultural and media studies, and film adaptation theory. Chapter Two looks back to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC 1990). I examine this text – the first BBC television serial to feature a lesbian protagonist – to establish a vocabulary for discussing the page-to-screen adaptation of queer identities throughout this dissertation. Chapter Three investigates Waters’s first novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) and its complex intertextual relationship with Andrew Davies’s serialized version (BBC 2002). I also examine responses to the serial in the British press, tracing the ways in which dominant cultural forces seek to domesticate non-normative instances of gender and sexuality. Chapter Four examines Waters’s novel Fingersmith (2002) in relation to Peter Ransley’s adaptation (BBC 2005) to situate adaptations of Waters’s retro-Victorian texts amid the genre of television and film adaptations of Jane Austen novels. I argue that Ransley’s serial interrogates the notion of Austen as a “conservative icon” (Cartmell 24) and queers the Austen adaptation genre itself. To conclude this study I address Davies’s television film (ITV 2008) of Waters’s second novel Affinity (1999). In this chapter I examine how the adaptation depicts the disruptive lesbian at the centre of the text. I argue in particular that by casting an actress who does not conform to dominant televisual norms of femininity, the adaptation is able to create a powerful audiovisual transgendered moment which adds to the novel’s destabilization of Victorian hierarchies of gender and class. This chapter considers, finally, how Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and Affinity have contributed to lesbian visibility on British television.Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-05-27 11:26:42.504
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Wu, Che-Yen, and 吳哲硯. "Magic in Three Contemporary British and American Novels: Trauma, Archive, and Spectacle." Thesis, 2014. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/89173047121385029777.
Full textAbstract:
博士國立臺灣大學
外國語文學研究所
102
Abstract This dissertation is about magic and literature, magic in literature, and literariness in magic. It begins with one simple question: What can magic do today? Except as a form of light-hearted recreation and entertainment, or art at best, does magic have any “serious” function in a world full of traumatic memories, violence, and hostility toward the other? Tracing its lineage, we can find that the dissemination of magic runs from top to bottom, toward the process of secularization. Its meaning and function vary from time to time. My further question is: When magic appears in contemporary literary texts, what food for thought does it offer us? I bring the discourses of magic along with theoretical approaches into three contemporary British and American novels to treat traumatic memories in The Prestige, archive in The War Magician, and spectacle of disability in Mr. Sebastian and The Negro Magician respectively. Christopher Priest’s The Prestige is mainly associated with a family feud and a large part of the text is suggestive of imperialism, (post)colonialism, and disenchantment. David Fisher’s The War Magician is all about memories of the cruel Second World War. Daniel Wallace’s Mr. Sebastian and The Negro Magician has everything to do with a black man’s miserable story told by four freaks. The issues I treat in the three texts include traumatic memories of family, colonialism, modernity, archive of war, and discrimination against the disabled as spectacle. In the three texts, magic as trope to set the narrative in motion has potential for changing the given structure. I review the poetics, possibility, and failure of magic with regard to dissolving the identity in the three texts.
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Quarrie, Cynthia. "What Violently Elects Us: Filiation, Ethics, and War in the Contemporary British Novel." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/65489.
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This dissertation examines the trope of filiation in novels by three contemporary British writers: John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
The trope of filiation and the related theme of inheritance has long been central to the concerns of the British novel, but it took on a new significance in the twentieth century, as the novel responded both thematically and formally to the aftermath of the two world wars. This study demonstrates the ways in which Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro each situate their work in relation to this legacy, by means of an analogy between the inheritance structures figured within their novels and the inheritance performed by their engagement with the genre itself.
This study relies on an instructive analogy to similar treatments of the larger problem of cultural filiation by the theorists Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Levinas exposes in his work the ethical and political problems of modernist temporality by critiquing modernity’s rejection of filiation, a rejection modeled also in the lost children, and barren and celibate men and women of modernist novels. Derrida meanwhile provides a way forward with his representation and performance of inheritance as a critical and transformative act, which is characterised on one hand by an ethical injunction, and on the other, by a filtering or a differentiation which changes the tradition even as it reaffirms it.
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Balážová, Anna. "Zobrazení rodiny v románech Intimacy (Hanif Kureishi), Scissors Paper Stone (Elizabeth Day)." Master's thesis, 2014. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-323087.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis concentrates on the depiction of family in two contemporary British novels. These are: Hanif Kureishiʼs In macy (1998), wri en in the first person narra ve, and Elizabeth Day's Scissors Paper Stone (2011), written in the third person narrative. This thesis analyses the novels from various perspectives with the main emphasis put on the theme of family. It also takes into consideration the different narrative modes used in the novels. In the theoretical part this thesis concentrates on the development of family with the main stress placed on the changes that took place in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain. The topics that it deals with are the breakdown of a relationship, fatherhood, dysfunctional communication and other themes concerning the family and interpersonal relationships.