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1
Yeasting, Jeanne E. "Double trouble : romantic idealism in the novels of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Angela Carter /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9401.
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Cattell, Victoria Fayrer. "Irony and alazony in the English Künstlerroman." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65961.
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Traub, Courtney Anne. "Romanticising crisis : digital revolution and ecological risk in late postmodern American fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:adb4eb33-9053-402c-8322-bd55c915077f.
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This thesis probes how recent experimental American "crisis fictions" from authors including Mark Z. Danielewski, Kathryn Davis, and Evan Dara reformulate transatlantic Romantic literary debates about technological and environmental change. Arguing that such texts extend previously theorised ties between Romanticism and postmodernism, it identifies enduring ties between late-postmodern accounts of crisis and those of Romantic predecessors. Responding to the upheavals of digital revolution and ecological risks, these texts, published between 1995 and 2012, inventively engage several linchpin constructs in transatlantic Romantic writing: chiefly, the imagined supersession of subjective and temporal boundaries; a sense that the natural and non-human world is of crucial importance; and a reliance on idioms of sublimity to suggest the unrepresentability of the aforementioned crises. Although numerous critics have traced similarities between Romantic and postmodern modes, this thesis considers those resonances as deeper questions of cultural and literary history. It proposes to more carefully historicise the Romantic intellectual heritage in late postmodernism, identifying intermediating moments that inform contemporary accounts of crisis. It unearths how late postmodern technocultural and environmentalist imaginaries were always already Romantic. Deeply informed by countercultural, mid-century American movements and ideas that themselves drew significantly from transatlantic Romanticism, contemporary figurations of upheaval, syncretically figured in mid-century publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog, are indebted to both Romantic and neo-Romantic heritages. This thesis additionally argues that the digital revolution and unprecedented environmental crisis act as pressures on postmodern literary practices from the mid-1990s onward. Digital speeding and a looming sense of ecological risk register as even earlier crises than the terrorist attacks of "9-11", requiring a recalibration of what the postmodern might mean and do. Crucially, in their preoccupation with embodied realities and environments, including natural ones, the contemporary narratives examined here diverge from the assumption that the natural world bears little importance in postmodern fields of representation. Finally, many recent literary experiments figure themselves as materially participating in the technological and medial systems they respond to; formal experimentation is, accordingly, another centre of interest. This research examines how select texts deploy formal strategies to "materially instantiate" Romantic ideas, to borrow Katherine Hayles's term. Although numerous critics have suggested that Romantic discourse permeates digital cultural imaginaries, existing scholarship devotes little attention to how formal experimentation intersects with narrative strategies.
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Ailwood, Sarah Louise. ""What men ought to be" masculinities in Jane Austen's novels /." Access electronically, 2008. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/124.
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Pauly, Susanne. "Madness in English-Canadian fiction." [S.l. : s.n.], 1999. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=961035455.
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Knox-Shaw, Peter. "The explorer in English fiction." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22436.
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Although there have been a number of critical works on the novel given over to topics such as adventure, colonization or the politics of the frontier, a comparative study of novels in which an encounter with unknown territory holds central importance has till now been lacking. My aim in this thesis is to analyse and relate a variety of texts which show representatives of a home culture in confrontation with terra incognita or unfamiliar peoples. There is, as it turns out, a strong family resemblance between the novels that fall into this category whether they belong, like Robinson Crusoe, Coral Island or Lord of the Flies, to the "desert island" tradition where castaways have exploration thrust upon them or present, as in the case of Moby Dick, The Lost World or Voss, ventures deliberately undertaken. There are frequent indications, too, that many of the novelists in question are aware of working within a particular, subsidiary genre. This means, in sum, even when it comes to texts as culturally remote as, say, Captain Singleton and Heart of Darkness that there is firm ground for comparison. The emphasis of this study is, in consequence, historical as well as critical. In order to show that many conventions which are recurrent in the fiction inhere in the actual business of coming to grips with the unknown, I begin with a theoretical introduction illustrated chiefly from the writings of explorers. Travelogues reveal how large a part projection plays in every rendering of unvisited places. So much is imported that one might hypothesize, for the sake of a model, a single locality returning a stream of widely divergent images over the lapse of years. In effect it is possible to demonstrate a shift of cultural assumptions by juxtaposing, for example, a passage that tricks out a primeval forest in all the iconography of Eden with one written three centuries later in which - from essentially the same scene - the author paints a picture of Malthusian struggle and survival of the fittest. And since the explorer is not only inclined to embody his image of the natural man in the people he meets beyond the frontiers of his own culture, but is likely also to read his own emancipation from the constraints of polity in terms of a return to an underlying nature, the concern with genesis is one that recurs with particular persistence in texts dealing with exploration. With varying degrees of awareness novelists have responded, ever since Defoe, to the idea that the encounter with the unfamiliar mirrors the identity of the explorer. Their presentations of terra incognita register the crucial phases of social history - the institution of mercantilism, the rise and fall of empire - but generally in relation to psychological and metaphysical questions of a perennial kind. The nature of man is a theme that proves, indeed, remarkably tenacious in these works, for a reason Lawrence notes in Kangaroo: "There is always something outside our universe. And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul".
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Jones, Margaret Anne. "The Blackshaw Chord ; Crime fiction, literary fiction : why the demarcation?" Thesis, University of Southampton, 2013. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/366620/.
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My thesis is in two parts: Part 1 a novel, Part 2 a critical rationale. The novel examines abuse in a range of manifestations – parental power; alcohol; the press; corporate power – all of which combine to perpetrate a catalogue of abuse against my protagonist. But it is the completely innocent protagonist who is perceived as the abuser. The novel quite deliberately has the feel of a crime story although the only serious crime is off-the-page and not connected with any of the characters or locations. This is intentional. The critical rationale seeks to investigate the classification of crime fiction and literary fiction with crime in it, and attempts to examine where the demarcation appears. Much of the critical rationale examines my novel in this regard. Initially I was looking at the debate from the point-of-view of non-whodunnit crime, but my research took me increasingly towards literary authors who have moved into mystery writing, such as, Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill, John Banville (Benjamin Black) and Joanne Harris. I refer to several novels from the crime genre and from novels which occupy a ‘hinterland’ whereby crime is a major element of the narrative but where they are not regarded as crime fiction. I have researched the shelving policies of the local library and bookshops, and interviewed writers with regard to where they wish their work to be placed. I have also considered briefly what is genre and why hinterland novels are placed somewhere outside the classification of any genre. Where appropriate I have quoted from published authors with regard to their position in this debate, and have used four main novels to discuss the development of my novel - John Brown’s Body; Psycho; Rebecca and Brighton Rock.
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Ambrosini, Richard. "Conrad's fiction as critical discourse." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20971.
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Al-Alami, Suhair. "Utilising fiction to promote English language acquisition." Thesis, Aston University, 2012. http://publications.aston.ac.uk/18726/.
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Towards the end of the university stage, students residing in the United Arab Emirates and specialising in subjects other than English are expected- amongst other university requirements- to have acquired adequate communicative competence as well as a repertoire of critical thinking skills. Despite the efforts made within the field of teaching English to EFL university students in the country, the output gained in terms of acquired skills and competencies is still below expectations. The main concerns of the current thesis are, therefore, a) to investigate the factors which inhibit EFL university students’ progress in the areas of acquiring adequate communicative competence as well as critical thinking skills, and b) to propose a course book and pedagogic methods to improve students’ progress in the areas of acquiring adequate communicative competence as well as critical thinking skills. Believing in the essential role literature plays in enhancing critical thinking and promoting communicative competence on the part of EFL learners, the current study introduces a course, designed and implemented by the researcher: LEARN AND GAIN. The proposed course is fiction-based language teaching, adopting the view that literature is a resource rather than an object, thus advocating the use of literature as one of the main resources in foreign/second language acquisition. Investigating whether or not the proposed course was effective in promoting EFL university students’ communicative competence as well as enhancing their critical thinking skills, a study sample taken from the study population was selected. Adopting an experimental design, the research project involved two groups: experimental and control. The experimental group students were exposed to the proposed course whilst the control group students were exposed to a general English language course. To examine treatment effectiveness, the researcher set and administered a pre-post test. Divided into two main parts, communicative critical reading competence and communicative critical writing competence, the pre-post test measured subjects’ communicative critical reading competence and subjects’ communicative critical writing competence. In addition, a pre-post questionnaire was administered and a semi-structured interview was conducted involving the experimental group students, to gain an awareness of students’ attitudes towards learning literary texts in general, and the proposed course in particular. To examine issues of interest and relevance, gender differences: male vs. female, and university major: science vs. non-science, were also examined for enrichment purposes. For the purpose of gathering sufficient data about subjects’ achievements on the pre-post, the following statistical tests were conducted: Mann-Whitney test, and paired data t-test. Based on the statistical findings, the experimental group students’ performance on the communicative critical reading competence pre-post test and the communicative critical writing competence pre-post test was significantly better than their counterparts of the control group students. Speaking of gender differences in relation to language performance on the communicative critical reading competence pre-post test and the communicative critical writing competence pre-post test, no significant differences were cited. Neither did the researcher cite any significant performance differences between science/non-science students on the communicative critical reading competence pre-post test and the communicative critical writing competence pre-post test. As far as the questionnaire’s findings are concerned, the experimental group students’ responses to the post-questionnaire’s items were more positive than those of their responses to the pre-questionnaire’s, thus indicating some positive attitudes towards literature, which students possibly gained throughout the course of implementation. Relating the discussion to the interview’s results, students conveyed their satisfaction with the proposed course, emphasising that promoting English language skills through the use of literary texts was rewarding. In the light of findings and conclusions, a number of recommendations as well as implications have been proposed. The current study aimed to arrive at some appropriate suggestions to a number of enquiries, yet concluding with some areas of enquiry to be explored for further research.
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Ellsworth, Ann Elizabeth. "Resisting Richardson : Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, and the didactic novel /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9501.
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Dalley, Lana Lee. "Writing the economic woman : gender, political economy, and nineteenth-century women's literature /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9430.
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Huttunen, F. (Fanni). "“Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction”:analyzing the content in Richard A. Clarke’s nonfiction and fiction." Master's thesis, University of Oulu, 2018. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201805312336.
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The purpose of this research is to study and compare the nonfiction and fiction texts of the former National Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism, Richard A. Clarke. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and his retirement from the government, Clarke has written several nonfiction books and thrillers with themes inspired by his career and the 9/11 attacks. On the cover of Clarke’s first fiction novel, The Scorpion’s Gate, there is a statement: “Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction”. This proclamation inspired the research questions: 1) Is Clarke revealing more in his fiction than in his nonfiction? and 2) Does Clarke attempt to affect the reader’s views by portraying things in a certain way? The research material consist of two of Clarke’s nonfiction texts, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (2004) and Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters (2008), and all four of his thrillers, The Scorpion’s Gate (2004), Breakpoint (2005), Sting of the Drone (2014) and Pinnacle Event (2015). The methodology used to analyze the texts is qualitative content analysis. The data is gathered from the six books by relevance sampling and based on these samples, a thematic coding frame is built. The samples are divided into the identified themes: Cyber Security and Warfare, Energy, Government, Homeland Security, Intelligence and Terrorism. In the analysis the content of the nonfiction and fiction samples is compared and possible indications of attempts to affect the reader are studied. The results of the theme centered analyses are compiled and discussed in order to answer the research questions. Based on the analysis and discussion it was determined that for the most part, Clarke is actually saying less in his fiction compared to the nonfiction. The only anomaly was the subject of drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, which was addressed in the thriller Sting of the Drone but not discussed in the nonfiction texts. It was also concluded that Clarke is most certainly trying to influence the reader. The views and actions that Clarke criticized in his nonfiction were also portrayed negatively in his fiction. These negative characterizations were contrasted with positive references to matters that Clarke promoted in his nonfictionTämän tutkielman tarkoitus on analysoida ja verrata Yhdysvaltain hallituksessa kolme vuosikymmentä työskennelleen Richard A. Clarken kirjoittamaa tietokirjallisuutta ja fiktiota. 11.9.2001 tapahtuneiden terroristi-iskujen jälkeen, Clarke on kirjoittanut useita tietokirjallisia teoksia sekä trillereitä, joiden kaikkien aihepiiri on saanut inspiraationsa Clarken hallitusurasta sekä edellä mainituista terroristi-iskuista. Hänen ensimmäinen trillerinsä The Scorpion’s Gate julkaistiin vuonna 2005 ja sen kannessa todetaan ”joskus fiktion kautta pystytään kertomaan enemmän totuutta.” Tämän väitteen pohjalta rakennetut tutkimuskysymykset ovat 1) Paljastaako Clarke enemmän kaunokirjallisissa teoksissaan kuin tietokirjallisuudessaan? ja 2) Pyrkiikö Clarke vaikuttamaan lukijan mielipiteisiin esittämällä asioita tietyllä tavalla? Tutkimusmateriaali koostuu kahdesta Clarken muistelmasta, nimiltään Against All Enemies (2004) and Your Government Failed You (2008), sekä kaikista hänen neljästä trilleristään, jotka ovat The Scorpion’s Gate (2004), Breakpoint (2005), Sting of the Drone (2014) ja Pinnacle Event (2015). Tutkimusmenetelmänä käytetään laadullista sisällönanalyysia ja sen erilaisia painotuksia. Analysoitava aineisto luodaan Clarken kirjoista relevanssiotannalla ja näiden näytteiden perusteella laaditaan teemaperusteinen runko. Näytteet jaetaan laadittuihin teemoihin, jotka ovat seuraavat: kyberturvallisuus ja -sotiminen, energia, hallitus, kotimaan turvallisuus, tiedustelu ja terrorismi. Tarkastelussa tietokirjallisuudesta ja fiktiosta kerättyjen näytteiden sisältöä verrataan keskenään ja tutkitaan löytyykö niistä mielipiteisiin vaikuttamista. Teemoittain tehtyjen analyysien tulokset yhdistetään ja tutkimuskysymyksiin vastataan näiden yhdistettyjen tuloksien pohjalta. Analyysin tulosten perusteella voidaan todeta, että pääasiallisesti Clarke kertoo fiktiossaan tietokirjallisuuttaan vähemmän. Ainoa poikkeus olivat droonit, eli kauko-ohjattavat lentävät alukset, joita käsiteltiin Sting of the Drone trilleristä kerätyissä näytteissä mutta niitä ei puolestaan mainittu Clarken tietokirjoissa. Analyysin pohjalta todettiin myös, että Clarke pyrkii epäilemättä vaikuttamaan lukijaansa. Clarken muistelmissa kritisoimat asiat ja toiminnat esitettiin myös hänen fiktiossaan negatiiviseen sävyyn. Näiden epäsuotuisien luonnehdintojen vastapainona asioita, joita Clarke kannatti muistelmissaan, kuvailtiin puolestaan positiivisesti
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Smith, Warwick. "War and space in English fiction, 1940-1950." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2016. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/61022/.
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This thesis argues that a preoccupation with space is a characteristic feature of English fiction in the years following the outbreak of the Second World War and, more specifically, that the war's events caused this heightened interest in the spatial. Writing from the 1940s exhibits an anxious perplexity in its spatial descriptions which reveals an underlying philosophical uncertainty; cultural assumptions about spatial categories were destabilised by the war and this transformation left its mark on literature. Writers in London during the war were among civilians shocked by new sensory assaults and dramatic changes to the urban landscape. These material facts exerted pressures on the collective imagination and a major part of the literary response was an urgently-renewed interest in the problematics of space. The primary literary focus here is on Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, though work by other writers including Graham Greene, Mervyn Peake and William Sansom is also discussed. I draw on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to illustrate the challenge phenomenological thinking posed to prevailing cultural conceptions of space in this period and to suggest how the war directed writers' attention to the role that embodied perception plays in composing spaces. I also examine how technological change, particularly development of the V2 rocket, shook established spatial thinking and I discuss how conceptual categories such as adjacence, linearity and sequence were further disrupted by the political divisions of post-war Europe. Documentary and diary sources are used to support literary evidence. English fiction changed abruptly and significantly in the 1940s because of a fresh spatial understanding emerging from the war which shaped the culture of the Cold War and the space race. This change demands reassessment of a decade often dismissed in literary history as a dull interlude between temporally-dominated high modernism and a postmodern ‘turn to the spatial.'
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Wannisinghe, Mudiyanselage Jayantha. "Emerging femininities in selected Sri Lankan English fiction." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2019. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/676.
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THESIS submitted by Wannisinghe Mudiyanselage Jayantha to Hong Kong Baptist University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and entitled "Emerging Femininities in Selected Sri Lankan English Fiction" May 2019. The study documents the rise of emerging Sri Lankan feminine subjectivities as portrayed in post-independence novels in English by Punyakante Wijenaike, Nihal de Silva, and Chandani Lokuge. It attempts to interpret the rise of socially constructed traits of new womanhood and shifting gender norms responding to significant transformations in post-independence Sri Lanka economy and society during which the nation has rapidly shifted from a traditional rural economy to an industrialized since the 1978 free market reforms embraced with policies of globalization and neoliberalism. The selected novels are historicized by means of specific data indicating that any compensations traditionally afforded to Sri Lankan women through the collusion of colonialism with patriarchy are being challenged by the current globalization of opportunity and risk, even as Sri Lankan women continue to engage in the far older struggles for respect in traditional contexts and spaces (Wijenaike), take up arms in service in the name of nation-building projects (De Silva), or search for greater life opportunities by means of out- migration and eventual return (Lokuge). Challenges to conventional colonial-patriarchal ideology, with attention to specific objects symbolizing alternative (or even "deviant") femininity long preceding modernity, are the central focus of Punyakante Wijenaike's Giraya and Amulet. The use of a Marxist-feminist approach, localized in the setting of the walauwe, allows for the examination of potentials and limits for women's subjectivities as they emerged in the earliest 1970s-era post-independence novels. Nihal de Silva's The Road from Elephant Pass explores the fictionalized portrayal of women soldiers, conscripted to the LTTE in the early 1980s, and the effects of a revolutionary posture upon traditional gender roles. The tension in de Silva's novel between the political liberation project as national/romantic allegory uniting Sinhala and Tamil causes as ultimately endorsing patriarchal claims of Anderson's "imagined communities" thesis in the dramatic context of women's participation in the civil war. Using a "Fourth World" sovereignty frame, the final chapter of the project analyzes the potential rewards and risks of diasporic experience, for women protagonists in Chandani Lokuge's If the Moon Smiled and Turtle Nest. Collectively, the analyses indicate how Sri Lankan novels in English have documented the struggles, potentials, and continuing vulnerabilities around the emergence of new feminine subjectivities for post-independence Sri Lankan women.
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Dunwell, Lara Dalene. "We make fiction because we are fiction : authorities displaced in the novels of Russell Hoban." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21400.
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Russell Hoban, born in Pennsylvania in 1925, is the author of fifty children's books and eight novels. This thesis provides a critical reading of his novels Kleinzeit (1974), The Medusa Frequency (1987), Riddley Walker (1980) and Pilgermann (1983). The thesis argues that the alienation of the protagonist from his society -- a theme common to the novels above -- is the result of the operation of the Derridean process of displacement. Hoban's novels work deconstructively to undermine binary oppositions (such as "reality" versus "fantasy"). I argue that the novels aim to recuperate the marginal by displacing the centre. In Kleinzeit and The Medusa Frequency, reality itself is figured as an absent centre. Through a discussion of magical realism, I show how Hoban questions the idea of a "consensus reality". I argue that by denying authority to the authors in these texts, Hoban privileges the uncertain authority of language itself. Using Derrida's concept of différance, I show that language in Kleinzeit is figured as an endless deferral of meaning. In Chapter II, I turn to an analysis of the invented post-atomic language of Riddley Walker, and examine how the neologisms and futuristic orthography of the text contribute towards significant wordplay. I argue that Riddley's attempts to read his culture's past offer a critique of the contemporary reader's assumptions, both about her present and about reading itself. I rely on Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return (1965) in discussing the nature of myth-making in Riddley Walker. In the final chapter, I discuss in detail the mechanism of displacement in Pilgermann. By examining the role of the grotesque in the novel, I argue that Pilgermann can be read hymeneutically. Derrida's figure of the hymen becomes the emblem of marginalisation. Using the example of the mode of the grotesque {which is prominent in the novel), I argue that the marginal is always already present in the very centre which would expel it. Pilgermann is read as an attempt to recuperate the margin in spite of "the confusion between the present and the non-present" (Derrida, 1984: 212) which is the hymen. Finally, I conclude that Hoban's works, while focussing on displacement, unwittingly displace women, by figuring them as absences whose existence is primarily metaphorical.
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Hensley, Martin. "The Green World of Dystopian Fiction." TopSCHOLAR®, 2006. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/276.
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Northrop Frye was the first theorist to develop the green world archetype; Frye used the term to refer to a recurring motif in Shakespearean comedy. In several of Shakespeare's comedies, the protagonists leave the civilized world and venture into the green world, or nature, to escape from the irrational law of society, which is the case in such comedies as As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Elements of the green world can also be found in Shakespearean tragedy, where the natural retreat serves as a temporary escape for the protagonists. Such a green world exists in three of the most well known examples of dystopian fiction: George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. In these three novels, the protagonists take flight from the repressive dystopia and journey into nature. In the green world, the protagonists attain individual freedom and identity and experience emotions, passions, beauty, the past, and the power of language. Each of these elements, which are associated with the green world, stand in opposition to the dystopian society's doctrine. The green world, then, becomes an escape, a place where the protagonists can temporarily live a free life away from the tyrannical powers of the dystopic society. The dystopian green world experience follows a pattern of flight, immersion, and departure. In the first segment, the protagonists flee from the oppressive society and into nature; in the second, they immerse themselves within the green world where they experience new sensations, emotions, and gain new insights and understanding; in the third, the protagonists depart the green world and return to the civilized world in order to confront it with the knowledge they have gained while immersed in the green world. This pattern can also be viewed as a symbolic cycle that moves from death to rebirth to death. The first death is the death-like stasis of the dystopia and of the protagonist, who is just a part of the whole and not truly an individual. The symbolic rebirth conies when the protagonists depart the green world as individuals with new know ledge and experiences. Lastly, the second symbolic, or sometimes literal death, comes when the protagonists confront the dystopia with their new knowledge, have that knowledge challenged by an agent of the dystopia, usually in the form of a trial, and, finally, are symbolically or literally destroyed by the dystopian agent.
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Oehling, Richard. "Contemporary Irish Fiction: Lavin and Trevor." W&M ScholarWorks, 1985. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625307.
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Herbert, John Richard James. "A revaluation of E.M. Forster's fiction." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4184/.
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This thesis seeks to re-examine the nature of E.M. Forster’s fiction and its place within the canon of modernist writers, examining criticism of Forster’s fiction and claims that it is transitional in its relation to modernism, founded on a liberal humanist outlook antithetical to modernist innovation. The thesis contends that this is a misreading of turn of the century Liberalism, taking Forster’s friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson as an inspiration for Forster’s political and stylistic beliefs, articulated in the latter’s fiction. Following a survey of New Liberalism, the thesis compares Dickinson’s and Forster’s politics and dialogism, charting how Forster transformed Dickinson’s dialogic method into polyphonic prose. After a survey of other self-reflexive narrative practices in Forster’s prose that might also be considered modernist, the thesis turns to Forster’s dialogic construction of inter-negating discourses at play for dominance throughout his fiction. It uses a model of social intervention derived from New Liberalism as the model for articulating the coercive attempts of discourses to gain dominance as truth over individual subjects, focusing particularly on emerging discourses of homosexual identity and their dialogic relation in Forster’s fiction. The thesis claims that Forster’s fiction is dialogic and liberal in its modernism.
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Alvarez, Heidi Lee. "Regional aspects of Miami crime fiction." FIU Digital Commons, 1999. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1263.
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This thesis argues that forces of literary regionalism and postmodern culture are behind the explosion of crime fiction being written in and about South Florida by a growing number of resident authors.
Research included four methods of investigation: 1. A critical reading of many of the novels that make up the sub-genre. 2. A study of the theories of regionalism, postmodernism and the genre of the crime fiction. 3. Interviews with a number of the authors and a prominent Miami book seller. 4. Sociological studies of Miami in terms of historical events and their cultural significance.
Today's South Florida crime fiction authors cast their narratives in the old genre of the detective novel where characters are delineated according to traditional definitions of good and evil. Evil characters threaten established order. What makes South Florida crime fiction different from traditional detective fiction is its interest in the exotic, postmodern culture and setting of South Florida. Like the region, the villains are exotic and the order that they threaten is postmodern. There is less of an interest in attributing a larger social meaning to the heroes. Rather, there is an ontological interest in the playing out of good against evil in an almost mythical setting that magnifies economic, environmental and racial issues. There is a unique cultural diversity of the city due to the geographical location of Miami in relationship to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the political forces at work in the region. South Florida's subtropical climate, fragile ecosystem, and elements of frontier life in a cosmopolitan city work to support Miami crime fiction. The setting personifies the unpredictability and pastiche of a postmodern world and may call for a new definition for literature that relies on non-traditional regional characteristics.
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Roux, Rowan. "Post-apartheid Speculative Fiction and the South African City." Doctoral thesis, Faculty of Humanities, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/33005.
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This thesis examines the role that speculative fiction plays in imagining the city spaces of the future. Considering the rapid pace of change that has marked post-apartheid South Africa as an impetus for emerging literary traditions within contemporary South African speculative fiction, the argument begins by sketching the connections between South Africa's transition to democracy and the emerging speculative texts which mark this period. Positioning speculative fiction as an umbrella term that incorporates a wide selection of generic traditions, the thesis engages with dystopian impulses, science fiction, magical realism and apocalyptic rhetoric. Through theoretical explication, close reading, and textual comparison, the argument initiates a dialogue between genre theory and urban theory as a means of (re)imagining and (re)mapping the city spaces of post-apartheid Cape Town and Johannesburg.
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Barker, Anna. "Green fiction : ecocriticism of the contemporary novel." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2016. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/32673/.
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Moldenhauer, Martin A. Fortune Ron. "Teaching concepts of textuality through engagement with authors' manuscripts." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 1997. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p9803729.
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Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1997.Title from title page screen, viewed June 5, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ronald Fortune (chair), Rodger Tarr, Ray Lewis White, Douglas Hesse. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-199) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Gardiner, Heather. "The portrayal of old age in English-Canadian fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ27927.pdf.
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Sousa, A. G. de. "English references in the fiction of Eca de Queiros." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.384793.
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Wang, Baorong, and 汪宝荣. "Shaoxing Dialect in English translations of Lu Xun's fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2008. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B40887698.
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Wang, Baorong, and 汪宝荣. "Lu Xun's fiction in English translation: the early years." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2011. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B46969081.
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Amar, Shruti. "Folklore, myth, and Indian fiction in English, 1930-1961." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2018. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/folklore-myth-and-indian-fiction-in-english-19301961(db116252-ebc3-44c9-b02d-c742a0f98c66).html.
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The thesis examines the complex relationship between folklore, myth, and Indian writing in English, with reference to a number of novels and short stories written between 1930 and 1961. I look in detail at the works of five writers: Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Sudhindra Nath Ghose, R.K. Narayan, and Balachandra Rajan. With the rise of the novel in India during the late nineteenth century, vernacular writers started to experiment with the form and style of fiction. Writing in various regional languages, they frequently drew on oral tales and devised new modes of narration. Such experimentation, however, was not confined to vernacular fiction. In this thesis, I argue that novelists writing in English such as Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and several others similarly developed a distinct style of writing, as influenced by myth, folklore and folk performances. Like the bhasa writers, they too began to experiment with the form of the novel and short-stories by incorporating tales, songs, and proverbs, and their performative dimensions. Folklore centred on women became crucial to this experimentation. It is this engagement with the myths, folk tales, songs and proverbs that this thesis investigates. Along with the novels of Raja Rao, Sudhindra Nath Ghose, R. K. Narayan and Balachandra Rajan, I analyse the short stories of R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand in order to understand the complex inter-textual links between written and oral traditions. There are two dimensions to my inquiry. First, through a series of close readings, I investigate how - both in terms of theme and structure - the use of myths, folk tales, songs and proverbs help to evoke, dramatise or even ironise complex situations within the text. Second, I pay special attention to the elements of performance in some of these novels. The sustained engagement of these authors with woman-centric folklore remains a strong sub-theme in the thesis; such engagement also encapsulates the various literary debates on the status of woman in South Asia and provides a glimpse into their everyday lives. In each of my chapters, I investigate the method employed to create a new form of fiction and also how such inclusion constructs the characters as well as the relationship between them within the complex strand of caste and gender hierarchies. Though the thesis sets out to broadly discover the intricate yet inevitable relation between the folk and the written, I have kept the time period between 1930 and 1961. The period is in itself relevant in modern South Asian history as it records the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era and so my focus remains on the texts produced during this phase. The recurrent nationalist discourse that finally culminated in the independence, as well as the partition in 1947, allowed the authors to set their fiction within the backdrop of a complex historical and political situation that offered as well as required various literary responses. The writers I argue particularly borrowed from the native mythology and folklore to respond to this change. The thesis thus intends to provide a broader perspective on the various ways in which pre-colonial and postcolonial narrative forms intermingled with each other to transform the colonial legacy.
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Jones, Benjamin A. "A history of the Welsh English dialect in fiction." Thesis, Swansea University, 2018. https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa44723.
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The systematic study of language varieties in fictional texts have primarily focused upon written material. Recently, linguists have also added audio-visual genres to the analytic framework of literary dialect studies. Studies have traditionally examined writers’ lexical, phonological, and grammatical output; contemporarily, research has begun examining metalinguistic commentaries and linguistic indexing of character stereotypes to this repertoire (Hodson, 2014).Except for minor analysis of early texts (German, 2009), there has been no large-scale investigation of any Welsh English dialect in fiction. This thesis addresses this gap, asking the fundamental question: throughout history, how has Welsh English been represented in fiction? The thesis surveys a large chronological scope covering material from the 12th century until the present day across four narrative-genres: early writings and theatrical writing, novels, films, and, new to literary dialect studies, videogames. In doing so, a historical discussion forms that covers Welsh English’s fictolinguistic output, cross-referencing its linguistic forms with recorded data, identifying forms hitherto unknown to dialectological surveys, and addressing metalinguistic and attitudinal stereotypes in fiction. Key findings include that phonology was an early representational linguistic domain in the literary dialect, whilst lexical and grammatical domains became common from 19th century literature onwards. The commonest phonological and lexical features were glottal fricative drops and tapped /r/; and the endearment terms ‘bach/fach’ and ‘mam’ respectively. Grammatically, ‘Focus Fronting’ and ‘Demonstrative There’ regularly occurred. Regarding linguistic evidence, several authors and filmmakers were prolific lay surveyors of the variety, adding to the historical dialectological record. Concerning dialectal attitudes, Elizabethan playwrights used linguistic stereotyping to create character stereotypes of Welsh people as ‘comical’. By the 19th century, fictive Welsh English representation was the dominion of native-users in literature, film, and videogames; however today, the Comic stereotype, and an emerging stereotype of Welsh English users being Fantastical, appears embedded within the dialect’s representation.
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Van, Pletzen Ermina Dorothea. "The language of painting in nineteenth-century English fiction." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21770.
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Bibliography: pages 322-332.This thesis examines the material and aesthetic sustenance which the novel as developing genre drew from the burgeoning popular interest in the visual arts, particularly the pictorial arts, which took place during the course of the nineteenth century in Britain. The first chapter develops the concept of the language of painting which for the purposes of the thesis refers to the linguistic transactions occurring between word and pictorial image when writers on art formulate their impressions in language. This type of discourse is described as governed by conceptual repetition and firmly established techniques of ekphrasis, as well as by indirect and peripheral modes of reference, not to the concrete stylistic features of the works of art under consideration, but to their effect on the viewer, the metaphors they call to mind, and the processes which can be inferred about their conception. The first chapter also gives a survey of the most important thematic strains and structural developments which had been imported into literature by the end of the eighteenth century. A chapter is then dedicated to each of five nineteenth-century novelists, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James, mapping out their individual grasp and knowledge of pictorial art in their particular circumstances, their experience of the art world, and the extent to which their experience of art is mediated by current painterly discourses. Each chapter next considers how pictorial material is appropriated in these novelists' fiction and whether the fiction draws structural support and meaning from pictorial concepts. The thesis furthermore investigates the inverse question of how the fiction itself becomes a context which not only reflects, but also shapes and alters inherited languages of painting. The second chapter approaches Austen's social satire against the background of the aesthetic traditions which she inherits from the eighteenth century. It is argued that her own novelistic aesthetic gains more from the discourses surrounding the practice of picturesque landscape appreciation (and related forms) than from Reynolds's doctrine of the general and ideal dominating the mid to late eighteenth century.
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Graham-Bertolini, Alison. "Home of the Brave: Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction." LSU, 2009. http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04142009-191748/.
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Vigilante literature tells the stories of individuals who rectify injustice by taking matters into their own hands. Examples of this plot can be found in American literature dating from colonial times, when settlers made an effort to preserve their moral code without the aid of an established justice system. The popularity of this theme finds further currency in tales of the frontier and the Wild West, and more recently, Hollywood has capitalized on its popularity by drawing from the myth of American pioneer culture and the theme of the lone avenger. This project identifies an analogous theme in contemporary fiction by women writers, who in the twentieth century began frequently employing female avatars of vigilante justice to challenge (in an illegal or extralegal fashion) those who violate the economic, social, or political rights of women. This dissertation analyzes a collection of novels and short stories by contemporary American women who employ the avatar of the vigilante woman, and demonstrates how female avengers, warriors, bandits, and killers extend and amend the vigilante tradition in the United States.
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Kurata, Kenichi. "Vicissitudes of desire in George Eliot’s fiction." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2010. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3751/.
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Critics have long recognised the conflicting tendencies towards progress and conservatism in George Eliot, which are reflected in the behaviour of her characters. This study focuses on the oscillating pattern of desire in this behaviour. As the characters alternately fight with and succumb to their desires, these desires seem to be disproportionately intensified, often leading to tragic consequences. The thesis seeks to analyse this process in the light of G. W. F. Hegel's and Jacques Lacan's elaborations on the nature of desire, which provide the theoretical basis for the discussion of the fiction. While Lacan sees desire as seeking its own sustenance and intensification, ultimately converting itself into a desire for an unfulfilled desire, Hegel sees desire as a movement of self-consciousness towards a return to itself that is accomplished by desiring the desire of another self-consciousness, that is, recognition. The thesis will explore several variations on the logic of desire which divert it from its path towards recognition, and these can also be seen as various types of addiction: namely, the art of hunger, Protestantism, money-hoarding, Orphic desire, the vicious circle of writing, the gambling appetite and the dialectic of homecoming. By examining through close reading how these motifs are given vivid illustration in George Eliot's fiction, this thesis will demonstrate that the theme of intensified desire is a prominent feature that runs throughout her works and is of central importance in understanding the complex emotional lives and interactions of her characters. The myth of Orpheus's descent to the underworld, which depicts an intensification of a desire for a structurally unattainable love object that is the dead Eurydice, can be seen as a paradigm that is applicable to Eliot's early works. The ascetic figure of Maggie in The Mill on the Floss is then compared to the hunger artist in Franz Kafka's short story, through analysing the abundant food references in the novel. Her adolescent asceticism can be figuratively understood as a kind of anorexia and later develops into a kind of bulimia in her relationship with Stephen. Silas in Silas Marner, too, can be seen as a hunger artist in his addiction to work, until he is freed from his fixation through raising Eppie. In Middlemarch, there is a continuity between the earlier figure of Maggie and Dorothea, and also between Silas and Casaubon. Dorothea, who marries Casaubon out of her art of hunger, utilises her marital relationship to work out and overcome that same art of hunger, guided by Ladislaw as the advocate of spontaneous enjoyment. In the other unhappy marriage, Lydgate's relationship with Rosamond is examined in relation to his appetite for gambling, and that appetite is then seen to play a central part in Daniel Deronda where it is related to Gwendolen's mode of desire, which feeds off and intensifies the desires of others until it is stifled by Grandcourt. Deronda, on the other hand, finds a tentative solution to the impasses of desire in his commitment to the Jewish cause, which can be understood in relation to the text's references to the myth of Ulysses. The centrality of the problem of desire in Eliot's fiction is finally underlined by its reappearance in the work of one of her important successors in the exploration of the psyche, Henry James, whose The Portrait of a Lady can be seen to inherit its critique of desire from Daniel Deronda.
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Walker, Victoria Carborne. "The fiction of Anna Kavan (1901-1968)." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2012. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8627.
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This thesis is a study of the British writer Anna Kavan (1901-1968). It begins by tracing Kavan’s life and examining the mythologies around her radical selfreinvention (in adopting the name of her own fictional character), madness and drug addiction. It attempts to map a place for her previously neglected work in twentieth-century women’s writing and criticism. Close reading of Kavan’s fiction attends to her uses of narrative voice in representing a divided self. Given Kavan’s treatment by the Swiss existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, the thesis explores connections between her writing and the British anti-psychiatry movement, especially R D Laing. Focussing primarily on the Modernist and Postmodern aspects of Kavan’s work, it also notes Gothic and Romantic inflections in her writing, establishing thematic continuity with her early Helen Ferguson novels. The first chapter looks at Kavan’s first collection of stories, Asylum Piece (1940) and her experimental novel, Sleep Has His House (1947). It reads her portrait of institutionalization as a nascent critique of asylum treatment, and considers Anaïs Nin’s longstanding interest in her work. Chapter Two draws on research into Kavan’s experiences during the Second World War, particularly her time working with soldiers in a military psychiatric hospital. Reading her second collection of stories I Am Lazarus (1945) as Blitz writing, it connects her fiction with her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944) and explores the pacifist and anarchistic views in her writing. The third chapter, a reading of the novel Who Are You? (1963), argues that Kavan engages with existential philosophy in this text and explores parallels with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The final chapter looks at Kavan’s last and best known work, Ice (1967). Following Doris Lessing, this chapter reads the novel’s sadism as a political response to the Second World War. Contesting critical interpretations which have pathologized Kavan’s fiction as solipsistic representations of her own experiences, this thesis aims to resituate her as a politically-engaged writer of her time.
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Sacks, Michelle Tamara. "Apocalypse and elegy in contemporary american fiction." Thesis, University of Cape Town, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6724.
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In this dissertation, the use of apocalypse and elegy in contemporary American literature has been explored in an attempt to draw some conclusions about America's complex twenty-first century consciousness. I have selected the millennial novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Blonde), Don DeLillo (Underworld), and Philip Roth (American Pastoral), since all three, written at the century's end, are at once apocalyptic and elegiac in tone, and comprise a useful trilogy tor giving voice to the fracturedness of the American experience. My analysis of the texts traces apocalyptic moments in the novels -- moments of destruction and rebirth, endings, new beginnings, and great revelations -- against some of the most turbulent and often despairing twentieth-century events, in an attempt to show the connection between public and private history. While contemporary apocalypse diners from its biblical origins, the desire for regeneration and renewal persists despite its necessary deferment -- and, even, failure. Yet the apocalyptic impulse persists, and it is this determined future-looking and repeated self-reinvention that I discuss. In terms of the elegy, I argue that the overwhelming sense of loss and mourning that permeates the novels is reflective of a much larger national sense of disillusionment and disappointment at the failure of the American Dream and the dissolution of the America conceived of in the imagination of its first European settlers. While the traditional elegy moves towards consolation, the contemporary elegy often denies the mourner such release from grief. Consequently, in the contemporary novels discussed, consolation is to be found elsewhere. Indeed, I conclude that despite the melancholia of novels that deal so intensely with death, suffering, and tragedy, the act of writing an apocalyptic novel -- of presenting an image of the apocalypse, even if not an apocalypse that gives way to rebirth -- is itself an act of hope, and a call for change.
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Holmgren, Lindsay. "Knowing children: telepathy in Anglo-American fiction, 1846-1946." Thesis, McGill University, 2014. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=121144.
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"Knowing Children" describes the means by which telepathic devices present the mind of the child in novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers. An intellectual interest in the child and childhood flourished not only during the same period as the formal study of telepathy, but also within the same circles. "Telepathy" can be understood for my purposes as a mode of narrative representation of consciousness and knowledge. Because social, linguistic, and cognitive limitations generally prevent child characters from articulating the contours of their surprisingly complex knowledge, their minds can best be rendered through the use of telepathic literary techniques that enable the child figures themselves to influence the course of their narratives. The theoretical core of the thesis illustrates how telepathic techniques in fiction influence causality, characterization, and reader reception. More broadly, the thesis demonstrates how the telepathic mode challenges the historical assumptions, narrative effects, and readerly responsibilities of so-called omniscient narration, showing how characters' minds are revealed through those of other characters, especially those of children, who would properly be sheltered from the discourses of authority. Thus, the thesis also calls into question the conventional category of childhood itself.« Enfants savants » décrit les méthodes par lesquelles les dispositifs télépathiques présentent l'esprit des enfants dans les romans de Charles Dickens, Henry James, William Faulkner, et Carson McCullers. Un intérêt intellectuel pour l'enfant et l'enfance ont proliféré en tant qu'étude formelle de la télépathie, non seulement lors de la même période, mais aussi à l'intérieur des mêmes milieux. Pour mes fins, la "télépathie" peut être comprise en tant qu'un mode de représentation narrative de la conscience et de la connaissance. Puisque les limitations sociales, linguistiques et cognitives empêchent généralement les personnages d'enfant d'articuler les contours de leur connaissance étonnamment complexe, leurs esprits peuvent le mieux être traduits par le biais de dispositifs télépathiques-dispositifs qui permettent fondamentalement aux personnages d'enfants à influencer eux-mêmes le courant de leurs récits. Le principe théorique de ma thèse souligne la manière dont les techniques télépathiques influence la causalité, la caractérisation et la perception du lecteur. D'une manière générale, la thèse démontre la manière par laquelle le mode télépathique remet en question les suppositions historiques, effets narratifs et responsabilités du lecteur lors d'une narration autrefois omnisciente, montrant comment l'esprit des personnages est relevé à travers d'autres personnages, particulièrement ceux des enfants, qui seraient probablement gardés à l'écart des discours de l'autorité.
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Mullen, Amanda. "Mythic migrations: Recreating migrant histories in Canadian fiction." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/29240.
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This thesis examines the work of five Canadian writers who use their fiction to recreate an immigrant past and to mythologize an originary moment in Canada: a migrant's arrival and settlement in a new land. Mordecai Richter's Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), Jane Urquhart's Away (1993), Lawrence Hill's Any Known Blood (1997), and Nino Ricci's trilogy, Lives of the Saints (1990), In a Glass House (1993), and Where She Has Gone (1997) each express a nostalgic longing for an authenticating mythology that will give a previously silenced ethno-cultural group a place in the national narrative. Nostalgia literally means a painful return home, and the narrators of these novels express a bittersweet longing for a Canadian past, for a Canadian home. While nostalgia has traditionally played a central role in ethnic literature, this longing has typically rested on a nostalgic desire to return to a distant homeland. Yet the narrators of this study express a nostalgia for a different kind of origins---for origins in a new land. Richter, Lee, Urquhart, Hill, and Ricci create detailed genealogies in their novels that show how their different groups---Jewish, Chinese, Irish, Black, and Italian---helped build the nation and what roles each of these groups played in Canada's past. This thesis thus reveals that the interrogation of Canada's master narratives is not complete and that, even for later generations of immigrants, there remains a desire to establish their identities as Canadian The five writers of this study are deliberately challenging the authority of Canada's dominant cultural paradigm by recreating the immigrant experiences of their ethno-cultural groups in order to refute the myth of two founding nations and to establish Canada as home for their own particular groups. With their mythologized versions of history, these writers are striving to include neglected and forgotten voices in the story of Canada.
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Hodan, Omar. "Fiction as School Assignment." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Lärarutbildningen (LUT), 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-35837.
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This thesis paper examines how six upper secondary school students perceive assigned fiction. In particular the students’ thoughts on issues which affect their reading are studied. Moreover the way the assigned fiction is assessed is also explored. The interviewed students were goal oriented yet they expressed certain dissatisfaction towards how the fiction was used in the classroom and suggested other means to facilitate fiction reading in classroom settings. Two of the students expressed they were under a great deal of stress, and indicated this ultimately affected their outlook on fiction reading.
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Hatter, Janine Elizabeth. "Brief sensations : a critical study of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's short fiction." Thesis, University of Hull, 2012. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:16508.
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In recent decades, there has been an upsurge in critical attention on the life and oeuvre of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Most of the critical output, however, relates to Braddon’s sensation novels Lady Audley’s Secret (1861) and Aurora Floyd (1862) (with a minority on her domestic novels and plays), and focuses on Braddon’s representation of a woman’s position in nineteenth-century society. This thesis is therefore the first extended piece to explore her short fiction – which includes short stories, edited collections and novellas – in detail and so contributes significantly to our understanding of Braddon’s life and oeuvre. The thesis begins with an exploration of Braddon’s multiple selves and how she (re)constructs her image throughout her life, and proceeds by an examination of short fiction’s critical position in both contemporary and modern discourse. Following this each chapter is dedicated to a separate subgenre of her short fiction – that of theatrical, supernatural, crime, domestic and children’s literature – and how each of these literary subgenres is another constructed performance, like her ‘multiple selves’. All of these chapters position Braddon and her writing within her contemporary Victorian context, whilst also examining how her contributions developed each of the subgenres considered. This is achieved by a comparison of Braddon’s short fiction with that of other authors of the period, thus our understanding of how Braddon impacted on the larger literary marketplace and influenced other writers will be examined. Furthermore, her short stories will be positioned in relation to her oeuvre as a whole, demonstrating that she did not consider the short story as inferior to the novel, which illuminates our knowledge of the hitherto marginalised genre of the Victorian short story.
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Howard, James Joseph. "The English novel's cradle the theatre and the women novelists of the long eighteenth century /." Diss., [Riverside, Calif.] : University of California, Riverside, 2010. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=2019834031&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1274465922&clientId=48051.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2010.Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed May 21, 2010). Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.
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DeVuono, Adrian. "Before the law: rethinking censorship in late modernist American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=104831.
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This study examines Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch within the contextual framework of censorship. In particular, the three texts are studied as providing unique challenges to the way that obscenity has been determined and governed by the trials that defined the modernist period in America. Therefore, the objective of this study is twofold: to investigate the complex, multidirectional and productive mechanisms of censorship; to recuperate the transgressive potential in the obscenity of Barnes, Miller and Burroughs from the afterlife of the legalized text. Situating these texts in the concept of E.S. Burt's "reading pact" – a sociohistoric contract of rules and regulations that governs the way a text is to be received within a given culture – reveals a intricate relationship between aesthetic form and the interconnected methods through which power and knowledge are secured. Within this interpretive scheme, I explore how obscenity ("the unspeakable") operates as a serious violation of the contract, one that works to widen the field of legitimate discourse ("The speakable"). In the first chapter, the "non case" of Barnes' Nightwood is proposed to be a result of the T.S. Eliot's intervention, reflecting a strategic effort to disguise Barnes' obscenity under the legitimating veil forged by Judge Woolsey's verdict in the 1933 Ulysses trial. The second chapter features an analysis of the epistolary origins of Tropic of Cancer and argues that the letter provides Miller with both a material base to dismantle the constraints of 'the well-made work of art' and a space to write the sexual body back into Woolsey's "l'homme moyen sensuel." Finally, an exploration of the monstrous unspeakability of Naked Lunch illustrates how Burroughs employs the figure of the double agent to deconstruct the allegorical method at the foundation of the legal codes that authorize literature under pre-fabricated moral precepts and bring about the end of censorship.Cette étude examine «Nightwood» par Djuna Barnes, «Tropic of Cancer» par Henry Miller, et «Naked Lunch» par William S. Burroughs dans le cadre contextuel de la censure. En particulier, les trois textes sont étudiées en fournissant des défis uniques pour le moyen que l'obscénité a été déterminée et régie par les essais qui ont défini la période moderniste en Amérique. Par conséquent, l'objectif de cette étude est double: d'enquêter les mécanismes complexes, productifs et multidirectionnelle de la censure; de récupérer le potentiel transgressif de l'obscénité de Barnes, Miller, et Burroughs de la vie après la mort légalisée de texte. Situer ces textes dans le concept « pacte de lecture » de E.S. Burt, un contrat socio-historiques de règles et de règlements qui régissent la façon dont la littérature est reçu dans une culture donnée, révèle la relation embrouillé entre la forme esthétique et les méthodes par lesquelles le pouvoir et la connaissance sont fixé. Dans ce cadre, j'explore la façon dont l'obscénité («non dicible») est une violation grave du contrat, qui élargisse le domaine de ce qui peut être inclus dans le domaine du discours légitime («dicible»). Dans le premier chapitre, le «non case» de «Nightwood» de Barnes est proposé d'être à la suite de l'intervention de TS Eliot qui reflète un essai stratégique pour cacher l'obscénité de Barnes sous le voile de légitimation du juge Woolsey's verdict dans le procès historique 1933 Ulysse. Le deuxième chapitre analyse les origines épistolaire du «Tropic of Cancer» et suggère que la lettre fournit Miller avec un matériau de base pour lutter contre les contraintes du «grand art» et un espace pour écrire le corps sexuelle de «l'homme moyen sensuel» de Woolsey dans la littérature. Enfin, une exploration de la indicible monstrueux de «Naked Lunch» illustre comment Burroughs emploie l'agent-double de déconstruire la méthode allégorique à la base des codes juridiques qui a autorisé le roman et aider à amener la fin du contrôle de la censure.
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Holland, Joanne. "Narrating Margaret Nicholson: a character study in fact and fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=32373.
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This thesis examines the historical and fictional character of Margaret Nicholson (1745-1828), a labouring woman who became notorious for her failed attempt to assassinate King George III in August 1786. After a quick trial, Nicholson was diagnosed as insane and spent the rest of her life in Bedlam. Her story continued to interest readers: she was the subject of multiple biographical chapbooks, the supposed author of a collection of radical poetry actually written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a source of mingled terror and fascination for both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. The thesis evaluates how Nicholson's story has undergone fictionalization from her time to the present, and examines how the boundaries between fact and fiction in the case have become so nebulous that history itself has become fictionalized.Ce mémoire examine le personnage historique et fictif qu'est Margaret Nicholson (1745-1828), une ouvrière qui devint notoire pour sa tentative infructueuse d'assassiner le roi George III en août 1786. Lors d'un procès rapide, Nicholson fut déclarée folle et passa ensuite le reste de sa vie à l'Hôpital psychiatrique de Bedlam. Son histoire continua à intéresser les lecteurs: elle fut l'objet de nombreux opuscules biographiques; on la crut l'auteure d'un recueil de poésie radicale dont le véritable auteur était Percy Bysshe Shelley; elle resta une source de terreur et de fascination aux dix-huitième et dix-neuvième siècles. Le mémoire examine la façon dont la vie de Nicholson devint fiction au fil des siècles et la façon dont les limites entre faits et fiction devinrent tellement brouillées que l'Histoire elle-même devint romancée.
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Derdiger, Paula. ""How shall we build?": fiction and housing in postwar Britain." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=117110.
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This dissertation charts the construction and dismantling of the British Welfare State, through novels, films, and architecture, with a focus on one of the defining issues of the period: housing. In 1942, the Beveridge Report designated housing a basic right for all citizens. After four million homes were destroyed during World War II, the reconstruction of houses and towns was an urgent task for the nation. In the Welfare State, housing became the measure of success for socialist interventions. Drawing upon literary studies, film studies, and architectural history, this dissertation traces four aspects of postwar housing – architecture, town planning, country house preservation, and government housing policy – in both fictional and non-fictional discourses. Realist representations, whether in novels or films, offer more than thematic representations of history; they actively contribute to its construction as much as town plans, architectural models, builders, and government policies. The two-way transmission between fiction and housing can be conceptualized spatially through a shifting relationship between the horizontal and the vertical. Bombs leveled buildings during the war; architecture and government policies aimed to level class and other social distinctions after the war. In fiction, horizontality and verticality emerge through both narrative tropes and formal techniques that critique the central social problems of the postwar period. Chapter 1 of this dissertation, "Boardinghouses," assesses the stakes of wartime and immediate postwar reconstruction through attention to the relationship between the individual and community in public debates, town plans, and two novels set in wartime boardinghouses: Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude (1947) and Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means (1963). Chapter 2, "Country Houses," examines the role of fiction in the transformation of postwar country house culture, with a specific focus on the phenomenon of the country house-museum and the tension between lived and narrated experience. Angel (1957), by Elizabeth Taylor, and The Little Girls (1964), by Elizabeth Bowen are critical iterations of the country house novel genre. Chapter 3, "Modern Living," considers the expression of mobility, verticality, and modernity in the fiction of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sam Selvon's novel, The Lonely Londoners (1956), Colin MacInnes's novel, Absolute Beginners (1957), and Joseph Losey's film, The Servant (1963), revise modernist aesthetics and principles for a multi-ethnic, socially and economically liberated generation. Chapter 4, "Safe Houses," measures the legacy of the Welfare State and its deconstruction under the Thatcher Government through the fictional desire for safety and hospitality in the built environment. In Graham Greene's novel, The Human Factor (1978), Doris Lessing's novel, The Good Terrorist (1985), and Ken Loach's film, Riff-Raff (1991), resurgent realism responds to the largest socio-political paradigm shift in Britain since the 1940s. Realist fiction confronts, and then constructs, the postwar world.Cette thèse analyse la construction et le déclin de l'État-providence anglais à travers des romans, des films et des exemples d'architecture, en portant une attention particulière à un enjeu qui a défini cette époque : le logement. En 1942, le Rapport Beveridge a proclamé que l'accès au logement était un droit humain pour tous les citoyens. Lorsque quatre millions d'habitations ont été détruites lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la reconstruction des logements et des villes est devenue une tâche primordiale pour la nation. Dans l'État-providence, le logement est devenu le barème de la réussite des interventions socialistes. En puisant dans les études littéraires, les études cinématographiques et l'histoire de l'architecture, cette thèse retrace quatre facettes du logement d'après-guerre – l'architecture, la planification urbaine, la préservation des maisons de campagnes et les politiques gouvernementales sur le logement – dans le discours fictionnel et non fictionnel. Les représentations réalistes, qu'elles soient romanesques ou filmiques, offrent bien plus que des représentations historiques; elles contribuent activement à la construction de l'histoire, tout autant que les plans officiels, les maquettes architecturelles, les bâtisseurs, et les politiques gouvernementales. La transmission à double sens qui s'effectue entre la fiction et le logement peut être conceptualisée spatialement au travers d'une relation qui glisse du vertical vers l'horizontal. Des bombes ont aplati des bâtiments durant la guerre; l'architecture et les politiques gouvernementales ont essayé d'aplatir les distinctions entre les classes sociales après la guerre. Dans les romans, les concepts d'horizontalité et de verticalité émergent à travers des tropes narratives et des techniques formelles qui viennent critiquer les problèmes sociaux de la période d'après-guerre. Le premier chapitre de cette thèse, « Boardinghouses, » évalue les enjeux de la reconstruction des logements pendant et après la guerre, en accordant une attention particulière à la relation entre l'individu et la communauté dans les débats publics, les plans urbains, et dans deux romans dont l'intrigue se déroulent dans des pensions familiales pendant la guerre : The Slaves of Solitude (1947) de Patrick Hamilton, et The Girls of Slender Means (1963) de Muriel Spark. Le deuxième chapitre, « Country Houses », examine le rôle de la fiction dans la transformation, sur le plan culturel, des maisons de campagne de l'après-guerre, avec un regard spécifique sur le phénomène des maisons de campagnes « musées » et la tension entre l'expérience vécue et la narration. Les roman Angel (1957) d'Elizabeth Taylor et The Little Girls (1964) d'Elizabeth Bowen incarnent des manifestations critiques du genre romanesque liés aux maisons de campagne. Le troisième chapitre, « Modern Living, » est une étude de l'expression de la mobilité, de la verticalité, et de la modernité dans la fiction de la fin des années 1950 et du début des années 1960. Le roman The Lonely Londoners (1956) de Sam Selvon, le roman Absolute Beginners (1957) de Colin MacInnes, et le film The Servant (1963) de Joseph Losey, révisent l'esthétique moderne et les principes d'une génération multiethnique socialement et économiquement libérée. Le quatrième chapitre, « Safe Houses, » mesure l'héritage de l'État-providence et sa déconstruction par le gouvernement Thatcher à travers le désir romanesque pour la sécurité et l'hospitalité de l'environnement bâti. Dans le roman The Human Factor (1978) de Graham Greene, le roman The Good Terrorist (1985) de Doris Lessing et le film Riff-Raff (1991) de Ken Loach, un réalisme renaissant répond au plus grand changement socio-politique que l'Angleterre a connu depuis les années 1940. La fiction réaliste confronte et reconstruit ensuite le monde d'après-guerre.
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Surma, Anne. "Disputing authorities : the longer fiction of Rebecca West." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1991. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/71979/.
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The thesis offers a reading of Rebecca West's longer fiction as texts constituted by disputing authorities. It begins by placing West in a socio-historical context, showing how her own life, personal and political interests were insistently grappling with questions of authority. It moves on in the second chapter to examine the contradictions inherent in the patterning of narrative structures in West's fiction. The third chapter considers the construction of authority within narrative contexts as a complex of textual power relations. A reading of female subject positions as sites of gendered struggle comprises the last chapter. Together these demonstrate the necessity for the redefinition of the notion of authority, a move which has significant implications for the meaning and relevance of power in respect of art and female subjectivity. In the course of the thesis, I draw on a selection of West's non-fiction writing and journalism, as well as autobiographical and biographical material, in order to furnish 8 context for her work, and to highlight the significance of opposing voices heard through the fictional texts. My readings are made from a feminist perspective (no extended study of West's fiction has hitherto been made from this pOSition), and are influenced by the writings of a range of feminist critics and theoreticians.
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Rao, Eleonora. "Strategies for identity : the fiction of Margaret Atwood." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1991. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/108219/.
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This study is a critical reading of the fiction of contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. My analysis focuses on problems pertaining to the questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity. The thesis is thematically structured. Chapter One, 'The Question of Genre: Creative Re- Appropriations, explores the plurality of genres and narrative styles present in the novels. The second Chapter' A Proliferation of Identities: Doubling and Intertextuality' examines constructions of the self in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity which conceive of the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's challenge to the notion of the homogeneous ego finds a gendered vision wherein woman assumes a multiplicity of roles and positions. Chapter Three 'Cognitive Questions' discusses the text's emphasis on sense receptivity and the epistemological question they pose in relation to language, reality and interpretation. Chapter Four 'Writing the Female Character' analyses Atwood's configurations of femininity, sexual politics and sexual difference.
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Komalesha, H. S. "Issues of identity in Indian English fiction : a close reading of canonical Indian English novels /." Oxford : Peter Lang, 2008. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb41328568g.
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Morel, Pauline. "Rag bags: Textile crafts in Canadian fiction since 1980." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=32559.
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The very impetus of this study — to examine the representations of craft in literature — defies the functional binaries so long attributed to art and craft. This study examines the literary formulations of textile crafts and their makers in Canadian works of fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century. Included are three Canadian novels published after 1990: Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996), Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe (2002) and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance (1995). Through close analysis of these patchwork novels, I suggest ways of reading quilts and other textile crafts as a recontextualization of the forms of the past (through the workings of displacement and parody) in Canadian literature. Chapter One proposes theoretical reconceptualizations of crafts culminating in the 1990s and establishes three paradigms that structure my analysis in each of the chapters: the relations of textile crafts with (a) narrative, (b) trickery, and (c) a dehierarchical and plural aesthetic. In the subsequent chapters, each one dealing with a single novel, I explore the reassembled quality of the narratives and variations of the spider-weaver archetypes they represent, both of which I consider fundamental to the patchwork novel. In Chapter Two, I posit the patchwork quilt in Atwood's Alias Grace as a model for the processes of recollection and fragmentation involved in historiographic metafiction. Chapter Three establishes the crafted object in Clarke's The Polished Hoe as a site of struggle and an embodiment of the collective and composite nature of heritage in the neoslave narrative. Chapter Four focuses on the way the "sordid quiltings" (379) of Mistry's A Fine BCette étude contribue à remettre en question la célèbre dichotomie entre l'art et l'artisanat en se penchant sur les représentations de l'artisanat dans la littérature. Plus spécifiquement, cette étude vise à explorer les représentations de l'artisanat textile et de la figure de l'artisan dans le roman canadien au tournant du vingt-et-unième siècle, à travers trois romans publiés après 1990 : Alias Grace (1996) de Margaret Atwood, The Polished Hoe (2002) d'Austin Clarke et A Fine Balance (1995) de Rohinton Mistry. Une analyse de ces trois romans-patchwork et du rapiéçage qui en informe leur structure et leur contenu nous révèle une nouvelle façon de conceptualiser l'artisanat tout en remettant en contexte des formes traditionnelles du passé (tels que tissage, tressage, couture) dans la littérature canadienne contemporaine. Le premier chapitre, explorant les théories transdisciplinaires autour de l'artisanat apparues vers 1970 et atteignant leur apogée dans les années 1990, propose trois paradigmes structurant mon analyse dans chacun des chapitres, à savoir, les relations entre l'artisanat textile et (a) le récit, (b) la ruse, et (c) la transformation et la pluralité. Chacun des chapitres suivants explore les récits rapiécés et les variations autour de la figure mythique du (de la) fileur(euse) rusé(e) (la figure du « trickster » dans le mythe nord-américain) qui constituent un ensemble caractéristique du roman patchwork. Le deuxième chapitre propose le patchwork présent dans Alias Grace comme un modèle de processus de récupération et de fragmentation propre au roman historique (ou ce que Linda Hutcheon nomme « historiographic m
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Clarke, Christopher. "Tracing the ethical dimension of postwar British experimental fiction." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2015. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/380677/.
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This thesis examines the treatment of failure in the experimental fiction of Alan Burns, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin in order to reconsider their work’s faltering relationship to postwar British culture. The thesis reassesses the significance of failure in these authors’s experimental fiction by drawing on Ewa Ziarek’s analysis of the affiliation between modernism’s aesthetics of failure and the deconstruction of scepticism. Following Ziarek, it reads failure in the experimental texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin through the lenses of the philosophical revision of scepticism and of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other to argue that we can rethink these novelists’s haunting relationship to postwar British culture by tracing their works’s ethical dimension. This methodology allows for a critical reinterpretation of the relationship between these experimental fiction writers and the postwar British public as it was imagined by a key supporter and funder of their work – the Arts Council of Great Britain. Though the Arts Council’s subsidization of postwar culture enabled the production of these experimental fictions, this thesis suggests that it also inhibited their modes of articulation through its subtle marshalling of the norms and conventions of the public, and thereby contributed to a tendency to misrecognize the significance of failure in these authors’s works. The first chapter introduces Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin by sketching their fleeting formation as a group in the late nineteen-sixties, and their relationship to the Arts Council. The chapter then elaborates on the thesis’s methodology by exploring how a sense of failure also haunted Raymond Williams and Doris Lessing’s attempts to rethink the relationship between culture and community in postwar Britain. The chapters that follow focus in turn on texts by Figes, Johnson, Burns, and Quin in order to outline the relationship of their work to different discursive communities and to devise new ways to read the ethical significance of failure in their experimental fictions. As a whole, the thesis argues that a rereading of failure in the texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin can shed light on the lasting legacy of experimental writing in postwar British culture.
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Chilton, Mark Daniel. ""Purposely mingled resonance" : strategies of misdirection in early Wells and Conrad /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3102157.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 330-346). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Hill, Colin. "The modern-realist movement in English-Canadian fiction, 1919-1950." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19471.
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This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.
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Jayawickrama, Sharanya. "Cross-cultural perspectives in contemporary Sri Lankan fiction in English." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.615180.
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Alexandru, Maria-Sabina. "Estrangement and return performances in contemporary Indian fiction in English." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.435063.
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