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Weekes, Ann Owens. "BEGINNING A TRADITION: IRISH WOMEN'S WRITING, 1800-1984 (EDGEWORTH, JOHNSTONE, KEANE, IRELAND)." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/183990.
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In search of an Irish women's literary tradition, this dissertation examines the fiction of Irish women writers from Maria Edgeworth in 1800 to Jennifer Johnston in 1984. Contemporary anthropological, psychoanalytical, and literary theory suggests that women, even those of different cultures, excluded from public life and limited to the domestic sphere, would develop similar interests. When these interests ran counter to those of the dominant group, the women would have had to develop a technique to simultaneously express and encode these interests and concerns. This technique in literature, and specifically in the writers considered, often results in a muted plot. On the overt level the plot reifies the values and tenets of the establishment, but, at the muted level, the plot often expresses contradictory and subversive values. In 1800, Maria Edgeworth employs a "naive" narrator who both expresses male disinterest in the awful situations of the women he depicts and also distances the author from any implied criticism of this male perspective. Edgeworth combines her subtle expose with a critique of the desires encoded as "human," but actually merely "male," in canonical literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross again use an arguably deceptive narratorial device, as does Molly Keane in 1981. Elizabeth Bowen employs a more subtle narratorial device in The Last September, but one which still distances the author from her text. The re-vision of texts, literary and historical, indeed the re-visioning of history, recurs in Bowen, Keane, Kate O'Brien, Julia O'Faolain and Jennifer Johnston. Finally, one can trace similarities of both theme and technique over the whole period, despite the modifications of time and social change. We can also point to the major thematic and structural change which occurs when, in the past ten to fifteen years, writers have reversed the placement of muted and overt plot.
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Visel, Robin Ellen. "White Eve in the "petrified garden" : the colonial African heroine in the writing of Olive Schreiner, Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/29445.
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Olive Schreiner, writing in the tradition of George Eliot and the Brontës, was an isolated yet original figure who opened up new directions in women's fiction. In her novels, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) she developed a feminist critique of colonialism that was based on her own coming-of-age as a writer in South Africa. Schreiner's work inspired and influenced Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, who have pursued their visions of the colonial African heroine in changing forms which nevertheless consciously hark back to the "mother novel." Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937), Lessing's Martha Quest (1952) and Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953) are in a sense revisions of Schreiner's Story of an African Farm. These texts, together with later novels by Lessing and Gordimer (such as Shikasta and Burger's Daughter, 1979) and key short stories by the four writers, form a body of writing I call the "African Farm" texts. Written in different colonial countries—South Africa, Kenya and Rhodesia—in response to different historical circumstances, from different ideological and aesthetic stances, the "African Farm" fictions depict the problematic situation of the white African heroine who is alienated both from white colonial society and from black Africa. Through her own rebellion against patriarchal mores as she struggles to define herself as an artistic, intellectual woman in a hostile environment, she uncovers the connections between patriarchy and racism under colonialism. She begins to identify with the black Africans in their oppression and their incipient struggle for independence; however she cannot shed her white inheritance of privilege and guilt. Just as colonial society (the white "African Farm") becomes for her a desert, a cemetery, a false, barren, "petrified garden," so black Africa becomes its idealized counterpart: a fertile realm of harmony and possibility, the true Garden of Eden from which she, as White Eve, is exiled. I trace the "African Farm" theme and imagery through the work of other white Southern African writers, such as J.M. Coetzee, whose stark, poetic, postmodernist
novels can be read as a coda to the realistic fiction of the four women writers. Finally, I look at the post-"African Farm" texts of such transitional writers as Bessie Head, whose novels of black Africa preserve a suggestive link with Schreiner.<br>Arts, Faculty of<br>English, Department of<br>Graduate
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Marron, Rosalyn Mary. "Rewriting the nation : a comparative study of Welsh and Scottish women's fiction from the wilderness years to post-devolution." Thesis, University of South Wales, 2012. https://pure.southwales.ac.uk/en/studentthesis/rewriting-the-nation(acc79b10-cd63-48ee-b045-dabb5af2f77c).html.
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Since devolution there has been a wealth of stimulating and exciting literary works by Welsh and Scottish women writers, produced as the boundaries of nationality were being dismantled and ideas of nationhood transformed. This comparative study brings together, for the first time, Scottish and Welsh women writers’ literary responses to these historic political and cultural developments. Chapter one situates the thesis in a historical context and discusses some of the connections between Wales and Scotland in terms of their relationship with ‘Britain’ and England. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical context and argues that postcolonial and feminist theories are the most appropriate frameworks in which to understand both Welsh and Scottish women’s writing in English, and their preoccupations with gendered inequalities and language during the pre- and post-devolutionary period. The third chapter examines Welsh and Scottish women’s writing from the first failed referendum (1979) to the second successful one (1997) to provide a sense of progression towards devolution. Since the process of devolution began there has been an important repositioning of Scottish and Welsh people’s perception of their culture and their place within it; the subsequent chapters – four, five, six and seven – analyse a diverse body of work from the symbolic transference of powers in 1999 to 2008. The writers discussed range from established authors such as Stevie Davies to first-time novelists such as Leela Soma. Through close comparative readings focusing on a range of issues such as marginalised identities and the politics of home and belonging, these chapters uncover and assess Welsh and Scottish women writers’ shared literary assertions, strategies and concerns as well as local and national differences. The conclusions drawn from this thesis suggest that, as a consequence of a history of sustained internal and external marginalization, post-devolution Welsh and Scottish women’s writing share important similarities regarding the politics of representation. The authors discussed in this study are resisting writers who textually illustrate the necessity of constantly rewriting national narratives and in so doing enable their audience to read the two nations and their peoples in fresh, innovative and divergent ways.
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Hill, Geoffrey Burt. "'A breeding-ground of authors' : South East Asia in British fiction, 1945-1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708370.
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Hopper, Keith. "Imagining otherwise : Neil Jordan's counter-narratives." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669873.
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Maxedon, Tom. "A course portfolio, what is "Irishness?" : surveying Ireland's struggle to define a unified national identity, depicted in the country's literature from 1801-present." Virtual Press, 1996. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1027119.
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The purpose of this creative project was to advance scholarship in areas suffering a lack of attention by Ball State University. Exploring a broader scope of Irish writing than most theses would cover, this project could easily be incorporated by other universities which share Ball State's departmental impotence with regard to Irish literary studies. I chose a time frame of two-hundred years to focus attention for this course.My directed readings from my project chairperson and my research at the Dublin Writers Museum led me to the design of this hypothetical course in contemporary Irish Literary Studies. I chose texts from 1801-Present which examine the varied cultural assumptions that various sects of the Irish citizenry hold, as depicted in their literature. What I found is that as time progresses, the emphasis toward violent preservation of cultural identity increases literally. This portfolio maps out those assumptions via Irish literature.<br>Department of English
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Macbeth, Georgia School of Theatre Film & Dance UNSW. "A Plurality of Identities: Ulster Protestantism in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Theatre, Film and Dance, 1999. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/33257.
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This thesis examines the ways in which Ulster Protestant identity has been explored in contemporary Northern Irish drama. The insecurity of the political and cultural status of Ulster Protestants from the Home Rule Crises up until Partition led to the construction and maintenance of a distinct and unified Ulster Protestant identity. This identity was defined by concepts such as loyalty, industriousness and ???Britishness???. It was also defined by a perceived opposite ??? the Catholicism, disloyalty and ???Irishness??? of the Republic. When the Orange State began to fragment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so did notions of this singular Ulster Protestant identity. With the onset of the Troubles in 1969 came a parallel questioning and subversion of this identity in Northern Irish drama. This was a process which started with Sam Thompson???s Over the Bridge in 1960, but which began in earnest with Stewart Parker???s Spokesong in 1975. This thesis examines Parker???s approach and subsequent approaches by other dramatists to the question of Ulster Protestant identity. It begins with the antithetical pronouncements of Field Day Theatre Company, which were based in an inherently Northern Nationalist ideology. Here, the Ulster Protestant community was largely ignored or essentialised. Against this Northern Nationalist ideology represented by Field Day have come broadly revisionist approaches, reflecting the broader cultural context of this thesis. Ulster Protestant identity has been explored through issues of history and myth, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. More recent explorations of Ulster Protestantism have also added to this diversity by presenting the little acknowledged viewpoint of extreme loyalism. Dramatists examined in this thesis include Stewart Parker, Christina Reid, Frank McGuinness, Bill Morrison, Ron Hutchinson, Marie Jones, Graham Reid, Robin Glendinning and Gary Mitchell. The work of Charabanc Theatre Company is also discussed. What results from their efforts is a diverse and complex Ulster Protestant community. This thesis argues that the concept of a singular Ulster Protestant identity, defined by its loyalty and Britishness, is fragmented, leading to a plurality of Ulster Protestant identities.
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Gossage, Ann. "Between the lines : the representation of Canadian women in English-language novels written by women in the 1930s." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=24085.
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This thesis examines the role of Canadian women as presented in English language novels of the 1930s written by women authors. Within the context of the Great Depression it focuses on issues that are central to women's daily lives such as work, love, marriage and motherhood. It also isolates recurring themes in the novels and attempts to understand the authors' messages within their social context. Social reform, politics and gender relationships are among the subjects explored.
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Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.
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Anandan, Prathim. "Child/subject : children as sites of postcolonial subjectivity and subjection in post-Independence South Asian fiction in English." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711768.
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Duncan, Dawn E. (Dawn Elaine). "Language and Identity in Post-1800 Irish Drama." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc277916/.
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Using a sociolinguistic and post-colonial approach, I analyze Irish dramas that speak about language and its connection to national identity. In order to provide a systematic and wide-ranging study, I have selected plays written at approximately fifty-year intervals and performed before Irish audiences contemporary to their writing. The writers selected represent various aspects of Irish society--religiously, economically, and geographically--and arguably may be considered the outstanding theatrical Irish voices of their respective generations. Examining works by Alicia LeFanu, Dion Boucicault, W.B. Yeats, and Brian Friel, I argue that the way each of these playwrights deals with language and identity demonstrates successful resistance to the destruction of Irish identity by the dominant language power. The work of J. A. Laponce and Ronald Wardhaugh informs my language dominance theory. Briefly, when one language pushes aside another language, the cultural identity begins to shift. The literature of a nation provides evidence of the shifting perception. Drama, because of its performance qualities, provides the most complex and complete literary evidence. The effect of the performed text upon the audience validates a cultural reception beyond what would be possible with isolated readers. Following a theoretical introduction, I analyze the plays in chronological order. Alicia LeFanu's The Sons of Erin; or, Modern Sentiment (1812) gently pleads for equal treatment in a united Britain. Dion Boucicault's three Irish plays, especially The Colleen Bawn (1860) but also Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) and The Shaughraun (1875), satirically conceal rebellious nationalist tendencies under the cloak of melodrama. W. B. Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1899) reveals his romantic hope for healing the national identity through the powers of language. However, The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) reveal an increasing distrust of language to mythically heal Ireland. Brian Friel's Translations (1980), supported by The Communication Cord (1982) and Making History (1988), demonstrates a post-colonial move to manipulate history in order to tell the Irish side of a British story, constructing in the process an Irish identity that is postnational.
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Nash, Andrew. "Kailyard, Scottish literary criticism, and the fiction of J.M. Barrie." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15199.
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This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.
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Hall, Karen Peta. "Discovering the lost race story : writing science fiction, writing temporality." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0216.
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Genres are constituted, implicitly and explicitly, through their construction of the past. Genres continually reconstitute themselves, as authors, producers and, most importantly, readers situate texts in relation to one another; each text implies a reader who will locate the text on a spectrum of previously developed generic characteristics. Though science fiction appears to be a genre concerned with the future, I argue that the persistent presence of lost race stories where the contemporary world and groups of people thought to exist only in the past intersect in science fiction demonstrates that the past is crucial in the operation of the genre. By tracing the origins and evolution of the lost race story from late nineteenth-century novels through the early twentieth-century American pulp science fiction magazines to novel-length narratives, and narrative series, at the end of the twentieth century, this thesis shows how the consistent presence, and varied uses, of lost race stories in science fiction complicates previous critical narratives of the history and definitions of science fiction.
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Marsh, Rebecca Kirk. "Refiguring Milton in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2602.
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Since 1979 feminist scholars have misread key images in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. They delineated the extended essay as a groundbreaking feminist polemic that advocates abolishing the literary patriarchy, expressing distain for John Milton as chief offender. Through rhetorical analysis and close readings of passages, there seems advocacy for change in patriarchial education and for opening of the literary canon to women.
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Holmgren, Michele J. "Native muses and national poetry, nineteenth-century Irish-Canadian poets." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq28493.pdf.
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Chung, Wing-yu, and 鍾詠儒. "British women writers and the city in the early twentieth century." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B2702409X.
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Boettcher, Anna Margarete. "Through Women's Eyes: Contemporary Women's Fiction about the Old West." PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4966.
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The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.
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Campbell, Leslie Marion. "Scottish influence and the construction of Canadian identity in works by Sara Jeannette Duncan, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ57276.pdf.
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Canton, Licia. "The question of identity in Italian-Canadian fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ43473.pdf.
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Gantzert, Patricia L. "Throwing voices, dialogism in the novels of three contemporary Canadian women writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq23313.pdf.
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Rasevych, Peter. "Reading native literature from a traditional indigenous perspective, contemporary novels in a Windigo society." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/MQ60865.pdf.
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Glover, Jayne Ashleigh. ""A complex and delicate web" : a comparative study of selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002241.
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This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.
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Mathai, Kavita. "A question of identity : a study of three Indian novels in English of the nineteen eighties /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1996. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B1886174X.
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Bell, Alan Nigel. "The male novelist and the 'woman question' George Meredith's presentation of his Heroines in The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885)." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002245.
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Focusing on four early works, then three from his middle period and three from the 1890s, this dissertation explores Meredith’s role as a novelist in the unfolding of a social and literary paradox, namely, that with the death of George Eliot in 1880, the dominant writers of fiction were male, and this remained the case until the advent of Virginia Woolf, while at the same time the woman’s movement for emancipation in all spheres of life—domestic, commercial, professional and political—was gathering in strength and conviction. None of the late nineteenth-century male novelists—James, Hardy, Moore and Gissing, as well as Meredith—was ideologically committed to the feminist cause; in fact the very term ‘feminist’ did not begin to become current in England until the mid-1890s. But they were all interested in one aspect or another of the ‘Woman Question’, even if James was ambivalent about female emancipation, and Gissing, on the whole, was somewhat hostile. Of all these novelists, it was Meredith whose work, especially in its last two decades, most copiously reveals a profound sympathy for women and their struggles to realize their desires and ambitions, both inside and outside the home, in a patriarchal world. The dissertation therefore concentrates on his presentation of his heroines in their relationships with the men who, in one way or another, dominate them, and with whom they must negotiate, within the social and sexual conventions of the time, a modus vivendi—a procedure that will entail, especially in the later work, some transgression of those conventions. Chapter 1 sketches more than two centuries of development in female consciousness of severe social disadvantage, from literary observations in the mid-seventeenth century to the intensifying of political representations in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the rise of the woman’s movement in the course of the Victorian century. The chapter includes an account of the impact on Meredith of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and an examination of some of his female friendships by way of illuminating the experiential component of his insights into the ‘Woman Question’ as reflected in his fiction and letters. His unhappy first marriage is reserved for consideration in Chapter 2, as background to the discussion of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). This early novel, Meredith’s first in the realist mode, is widely accepted as being of high quality, and is given extended treatment, together with briefer accounts of three other early works, The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), Evan Harrington (1861), and Rhoda Fleming (1865), and one from Meredith’s middle period, Beauchamp’s Career (1876). Two more novels of this period, The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885), are generally considered to be among his best works, and their heroines are given chapters to themselves (3 and 4). Chapter 5 provides further contextualization for the changing socio-political circumstances of the 1880s and 1890s, with particular reference to that heightening of feminist consciousness represented by the short-lived ‘New Woman’ phenomenon, to which Diana of the Crossways had been considered by some to be a contribution. Brief discussion of some other ‘New Woman’ novels of the 80s and 90s follows, giving literary context to the heroines of Meredith’s three late candidates in the genre, One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895). The dissertation concludes with a glance at Meredith’s influence on a few early twentieth-century novelists.
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Hoffman, Megan. "Women writing women : gender and representation in British 'Golden Age' crime fiction." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11910.
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In this thesis, I examine representations of women and gender in British ‘Golden Age' crime fiction by writers including Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. I argue that portrayals of women in these narratives are ambivalent, both advocating a modern, active model of femininity, while also displaying with their resolutions an emphasis on domesticity and on maintaining a heteronormative order, and that this ambivalence provides a means to deal with anxieties about women's place in society. This thesis is divided thematically, beginning with a chapter on historical context which provides an overview of the period's key social tensions. Chapter II explores depictions of women who do not conform to the heteronormative order, such as spinsters, lesbians and ‘fallen' women. Chapter III looks at the ways in which the courtships and marriages of detective couples attempt to negotiate the ideal of companionate marriage and the pressures of a ‘cult of domesticity'. Chapter IV considers the ways in which depictions of women in schools, universities and the workplace are used to explore the tensions between an expanding role in the public sphere and the demand to inhabit traditionally domestic roles. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the image of female victims' and female killers' bodies and the ways in which such depictions can be seen to expose issues of gender, class and identity. Through its examination of a wide variety of texts and writers in the period 1920 to the late 1940s, this thesis investigates the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in Golden Age crime fiction written by women, and argues that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe' solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.
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Vrtis, Christina E. 1979. ""Death is the Only Reality": a Folkloric Analysis of Notions of Death and Funerary Ritual in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10697.
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viii, 91 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.<br>Caribbean cultural ideas and values placed on death
and mourning, especially in relation to cultural roles
women are expected to perform, are primary motivating
factors in the development of female self and identity in
Caribbean women's literature. Based on analysis of three texts, QPH, Annie John, and Beyond the Limbo Silence, I
argue that notions of death and funerary rituals are
employed within Caribbean women's literature to (re)connect
protagonist females to their homeland and secure a sense of
identity. In addition, while some texts highlight the
necessity of prescribing to the socially constructed roles
of women within the ritual context and rely on the uproper"
adherence to the traditional process to maintain the status
quo, other texts show that the inversion or subversion of
these traditions is also an important aspect of funerary
rituals and notions of death that permeate contemporary
Caribbean culture.<br>Committee in Charge: Dr. Dianne Dugaw, Folklore;
Dr. Lisa Gilman, English;
Dr. Phil Scher, Anthropology
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Rine, Abigail. "Words incarnate : contemporary women’s fiction as religious revision." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1961.
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This thesis investigates the prevalence of religious themes in the work of several prominent contemporary women writers—Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts, Alice Walker and A.L. Kennedy. Relying on Luce Irigaray’s recent theorisations of the religious and its relationship to feminine subjectivity, this research considers the subversive potential of engaging with religious discourse through literature, and contributes to burgeoning criticism of feminist revisionary writing. The novels analysed in this thesis show, often in violent detail, that the way the religious dimension has been conceptualised and articulated enforces negative views of female sexuality, justifies violence against the body, alienates women from autonomous creative expression and paralyses the development of a subjectivity in the feminine. Rather than looking at women’s religious revision primarily as a means of asserting female authority, as previous studies have done, I argue that these writers, in addition to critiquing patriarchal religion, articulate ways of being and knowing that subvert the binary logic that dominates Western religious discourse. Chapter I contextualises this research in Luce Irigaray’s theories and outlines existing work on feminist revisionist literature. The remaining chapters offer close readings of key novels in light of these theories: Chapter II examines Atwood’s interrogation of oppositional logic in religious discourse through her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Chapter III explores two novels by Roberts that expose the violence inherent in religious discourse and deconstruct the subjection of the (female) body to the (masculine) Word. Chapters IV and V analyse the fiction of Kennedy and Walker respectively, revealing how their novels confront the religious denigration of feminine sexuality and refigure the connection between eroticism and divinity. Evident in each of these fictional accounts is a forceful critique of religious discourse, as well as an attempt to more closely reconcile foundational religious oppositions between divinity and humanity, flesh and spirit, and body and Word.
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Witen, Michelle Lynn. "Perceiving in registers : the condition of absolute music in James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669882.
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Mbao, Wamuwi. "Imagined pasts, suspended presents South African literature in the contemporary moment." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002244.
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Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts. In this thesis, I consider a range of contemporary South African texts via the figure of lifewriting. My analysis demonstrates that, while many texts in the contemporary moment have displayed new and more complex registers of perception concerning the issue of ‘race’, there is a need for more expansive and fluid conceptions of crafting identity, as regards the politics of space and how this intersects with issues of belonging and identity. That is, much South African literature still continues along familiar trajectories of meaning, ones which are not well-equipped to understand issues that bedevil the country at this particular historical moment, which are grounded in the political compromises that came to pass during the ‘time of transition’. These issues include the recent spate of xenophobia attacks, which have yet to be comprehensively and critically analysed in the critical domain, despite the work of theorists such as David Coplan. Such events indicate the need for more layered and intricate understandings of how our national identity is structured: Who may belong? Who is excluded? In what situations? This thesis engages with these questions in order to determine how systems of power are constructed, reified, mediated, reproduced and/or resisted in the country’s literature. To do this, I perform an attentive reading of the mosaic image of South African culture that emerges through a selection of contemporary works of literature. The texts I have selected are notable for the ways in which they engage with the epistemic protocol of coming to know the Other and the self through the lens of the Apartheid past. That engagement may take the form of a reassertion, reclamation, displacement, or complication of selfhood. Given that South African identities are overinscribed in paradigms in which the Apartheid past is primary, what potentials and limits are presently encountered when writing of the self/selves is attempted? My study goes beyond simply asserting that not all groups have equal access to representation. Rather, I demonstrate that the linear shaping of the South African culture of letters imposes certain restrictions on who may work within it. Here, the politics of publishing and the increasing focus on urban spaces, such that other spaces become marginalized in ways that reflect the proclivities of the reading public, are subjected to close scrutiny. Overall, my thesis aims to promote a rethinking of South African culture, and how that culture is represented in, and defined through, our literature.
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Sojka, Eugenia. "Search procedures, carnivalization in language- and theory-focused texts of four Canadian women writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1996. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq25775.pdf.
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Sturgeon, Sinéad. "Law & literature in the writings of Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, and James Clarence Mangan." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711601.
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Tait, Lisa Olsen. "Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates and the Cultural Work of Home Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTNZ,25499.
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Kaplan, Stacey Meredith 1973. "The modern(ist) short form: Containing class in early 20th century literature and film." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10574.
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ix, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.<br>My dissertation analyzes the overlooked short works of authors and auteurs who do not fit comfortably into the conventional category of modernism due to their subtly experimental aesthetics: the versatile British author Vita Sackville-West, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen, and the British emigrant filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. I focus on the years 1920-1923 to gain an alternative understanding of modernism's annus mirabulus and the years immediately preceding and following it. My first chapter studies the most critically disregarded author of the project: Sackville-West. Her 1922 volume of short stories The Heir: A Love Story deserves attention for its examination of social hierarchies. Although her stories ridicule characters regardless of their class background, those who attempt to change their class status, especially when not sanctioned by heredity, are treated with the greatest contempt. The volume, with the reinforcement of the contracted short form, advocates staying within given class boundaries. The second chapter analyzes social structures in Bowen's first book of short stories, Encounters (1922). Like Sackville-West, Bowen's use of the short form complements her interest in how class hierarchies can confine characters. Bowen's portraits of classed encounters and of characters' encounters with class reveal a sense of anxiety over being confined by social status and a sense of displacement over breaking out of class groups, exposing how class divisions accentuate feelings of alienation and instability. The last chapter examines Chaplin's final short films: "The Idle Class" (1921), "Pay Day (1922), and "The Pilgrim" (1923). While placing Chaplin among the modernists complicates the canon in a positive way, it also reduces the complexity of this man and his art. Chaplin is neither a pyrotechnic modernist nor a traditional sentimentalist. Additionally, Chaplin's shorts are neither socially liberal nor conservative. Rather, Chaplin's short films flirt with experimental techniques and progressive class politics, presenting multiple perspectives on the thematic of social hierarchies. But, in the end, his films reinforce rather than overthrow traditional artistic forms and hierarchical ideas. Studying these artists elucidates how the contracted space of the short form produces the perfect room to present a nuanced portrayal of class.<br>Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English;
Michael Aronson, Member, English;
Mark Quigley, Member, English;
Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
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Holton, Danica Lynn. "Class and stratification in the works of Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0020/MQ49367.pdf.
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Volz, Jessica A. "Vision, fiction and depiction : the forms and functions of visuality in the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4438.
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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.
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O'Farrell, Kevin. "Joyce after Nietzsche : irony and the will to truth." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3de0686a-b70f-433c-ae20-9de7d554b08e.
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This thesis explores and evaluates the work of James Joyce using the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. It does so not only by examining Joyce's knowledge of Nietzsche's writings, but also through demonstrating how effectively they can illuminate Joyce's themes and techniques, and aid in a general reconceptualisation of his literary project. My analysis draws on several of Nietzsche's key concepts - perspectivism, ressentiment, the will to power - and applies them to Joyce's work. The main idea I use however is the will to truth. I argue that Joyce's primary concern as an artist was the depiction of what he saw as the truth of contemporary existence, in Dublin and more generally. This aim determines his technē, the origin and form of his work of art. Various manifestations of irony, a key element of Joyce's technique, help illustrate the importance of this will to truth. This understanding of his work eliminates the false division between form and content and through an emphasis on Joyce's artistry and philosophy, rather than the historical context in which he wrote (that is, on the author rather than the man), allows for a truly critical assessment. The five chapters that follow my introduction are chronologically ordered. They examine the early works, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially Ulysses, in considerable detail and from various angles. Though careful to respect the individuality of each, my analyses find a common thread of realism uniting the three major works of prose fiction; beginning with the French naturalism of the short stories, moving on to a new development of perspectival irony and a unique mode of allegory in his first novel, and ending in what Joyce called 'the new realism' of his epic. My study then explains how and why realism is problematised in the later chapters of Ulysses as the will to truth comes to question itself. The thesis concludes with an assessment of Finnegans Wake, considering how it marks a radical departure from Joyce's earlier practice, and why I regard it a failure.
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Veillette, Marie-Paule. "La représentation de la folie dans l'écriture féminine contemporaine des Amériques." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ57482.pdf.
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Leff, Carol Willa. "Bosman as Verbindingsteken: Hybridities in the Writing of Herman Charles Bosman." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013163.
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This thesis is concerned with how hybridity is created and interpreted by Herman Charles Bosman in his fiction and non-fiction. Bosman was a gifted writer and raconteur who captured the historical, socio-political context of his time by translating Afrikaans culture for the edification and pleasure of an English readership. Hennie Aucamp summed up this linguistic and cultural translation by pointing out that Bosman was a writer who acted as a “verbindingsteken” or hyphen (65) between Afrikaans and English. His texts contain many voices, and are therefore essentially hybrid. Firstly, by drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, the terms ‘hybridity’, ‘culture’ and ‘identity’, are discussed. Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘hybridity’ is the conceptual lens through which Bosman’s texts are viewed, and aspects of Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural theory also serve the same function. Thereafter, biographies of Bosman are discussed in an effort to understand his hyphenated identity. Following this, specific attention is paid to a selection of Bosman’s essays, short stories, and a novel. Scholarly opinions aid interpretation of levels of hybridity in Bosman’s work. In analysing Bosman’s texts critically, it becomes clear that he believed in a united South Africa that acknowledged and accepted all races. However, analysis also reveals that there are some inconsistencies in Bosman’s personal views, as expressed particularly in his essays. His short stories do not contain the same contradictions. Critical analysis of the novel Willemsdorp attests that cultural hybridity is not always viewed as celebratory. It can also be a painful space where identities are split, living both inside and outside their environment, and subsequently marginalized. Bosman’s texts, although published decades ago, remain relevant today in post-apartheid South Africa as much of his writing can be seen as a record of historical events. His short stories and novels capture a confluence of languages, people and cultures. His essays illustrate a deep commitment to promoting South African culture and literature. When reading Bosman one is constantly reminded that differences are not only to be acknowledged, but embraced, in what he prophetically imagined as a hybrid, post-apartheid South African society.
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Wallace, Linda M. "Negotiating place, explorations of identity and nature in select novels by contemporary Canadian women writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0018/MQ49460.pdf.
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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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Crowell, Ellen Margaret. "Aristocratic drag : the dandy in Irish and Southern fiction." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/12765.
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Glisson, Silas Nease. "Cultural nationalism and colonialism in nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction." Thesis, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/16852.
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This thesis will explore how writers of nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction,
namely short stories and novels, used their works to express the social, cultural, and political
events of the period. My thesis will employ a New Historicist approach to discuss the effects
of colonialism on the writings, as well as archetypal criticism to analyse the mythic origins of
the relevant metaphors. The structuralism of Tzvetan Todorov will be used to discuss the
notion of the works' appeal as supernatural or possibly realistic works. The theory of
Mikhail Bakhtin is used to discuss the writers' linguistic choices because such theory focuses
on how language can lead to conflicts amongst social groups.
The introduction is followed by Chapter One, "Ireland as England's Fantasy." This
chapter discusses Ireland's literary stereotype as a fantasyland. The chapter also gives an
overview of Ireland's history of occupation and then contrasts the bucolic, magical Ireland of
fiction and the bleak social conditions of much of nineteenth-century Ireland.
Chapter Two, "Mythic Origins", analyses the use of myth in nineteenth-century horror
stories. The chapter discusses the merging of Christianity and Celtic myth; I then discuss the
early Irish belief in evil spirits in myths that eventually inspired horror literature.
Chapter Three, "Church versus Big House, Unionist versus Nationalist," analyses
how the conflicts of Church/Irish Catholicism vs. Big House/Anglo-Irish landlordism, proBritish
Unionist vs. pro-Irish Nationalist are manifested in the tales. In this chapter, I argue
that many Anglo-Irish writers present stern anti-Catholic attitudes, while both Anglo-Irish
and Catholic writers use the genre as political propaganda. Yet the authors tend to display
Home Rule or anti-Home Rule attitudes rather than religious loyalties in their stories.
The final chapter of the thesis, "A Heteroglossia of British and Irish Linguistic and
Literary Forms," deals with the use of language and national literary styles in Irish literature
of this period. I discuss Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia and its applications to the Irish
novel; such a discussion because nineteenth-century Ireland was linguistically Balkanised,
with Irish Gaelic, Hibemo-English, and British English all in use. This chapter is followed by
a conclusion.<br>English<br>M. Lit. et Phil. (English)
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McCarthy, Karen Anne. "“An art which is honest enough to despair and yet go on” : the limitations and potential of narrative in three contemporary Irish novels." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10210/8457.
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M.A. (English)<br>This dissertation hinges on the exploration of three contemporary Irish novels, namely The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, The Gathering by Anne Enright, and The Sea by John Banville. What the three works have in common, besides their nationality, is a preoccupation with what exceeds their grasp: that is, their inspiration is also their limitation. All three set themselves the task of capturing and representing a past. The first two position themselves as rehabilitators of portions of Ireland’s history that have been occluded from official versions thereof. (Banville’s novel attempts to skirt as many limitations as possible, including a national one, in order to grapple, as unhindered as possible, with what narrative can achieve). Fictional rehabilitations of what occurred in a phenomenal reality are inevitably fraught because of their form’s limited grasp. However, this study seeks to trace each work’s fitful engagement with what it cannot encapsulate in order to ascertain the capabilities of narrative, in spite of its inherent limitations. I employ a broadly post-structuralist theoretical framework in order to engage with novels that incorporate into their content an awareness of the parameters within which they are obliged to function. Ultimately, I draw conclusions (which are necessarily limited themselves) as to the gesture each novel attempts to make beyond its bounds.
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Hart, Alexander. "Writing the Diaspora : a bibliography and critical commentary on post-Shoah English-language fiction in Australia, South Africa, and Canada." Thesis, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6638.
Full textAbstract:
In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000
Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he
concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their
marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's
and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion)
—at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the
theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about
the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature.
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Janzen, Beth E. "The boundary between "us" and "them": readers and the non-English word in the fiction of Canadian Mennonite writers." Thesis, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1805.
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This study asks whether the use of non-English words in the novels of Canadian Mennonites perpetuates a cultural binary, and concludes that it does not. The use of the non-English word, rather than enforcing a binary between "us and them", ultimately reveals that cultural boundaries are permeable and unstable. Recent reader-response theory, which sees the reader as always influenced by a context, is central to this inquiry. Analysis of readers' responses in the form of questionnaires constitutes part of the support for my assertions, while an examination of typography, orthography, interlingua, and theme in three novels by Canadian Mennonites provides the balance.
Chapter one lays the theoretical framework for the investigation. It discusses: reader-response theory and the impossibility of accessing a stable textual meaning coincidental with the author's intention, the challenge of the non-English word to the concept of universality, and the distinction between proper “English" and non-institutional "english". Chapter two examines some readers' responses to non-English words and finds that “inside" readers have interpretations in common with "outside” readers, and that variations exist between the interpretations of “inside" readers. A binary model is too simplistic to encompass the range of contexts from which readers read. Chapter three discusses typography, orthography, and interlanguage in relation to (Low) German, and suggests the importance of these features to a discussion of the texts. Chapters four through six examine Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China (1970), Anne Konrad's The Blue Jar (1985), and Armin Wiebe's The Salvation of Yasch Siemens (1984) respectively. Each novel's thematic concern with cultural boundaries serves as a framework for interpreting its physical and linguistic features. Chapter seven concludes by examining the influence of my own fragmented identity on the development of my argument, and revisits the issue of authorial intent in our politically less-than-perfect world. A lengthy appendix serves as a pluralistic glossary to the texts, and contains the responses to my questionnaires. A brief section outlines some of the appendix's interesting patterns and trends. An index to the appendix is provided since the appendix is not arranged alphabetically.
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Dyer, Rebecca Gayle. "London via the Caribbean migration narratives and the city in postwar British fiction /." 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3077633.
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Mukiwa, Faresi Rumbidzai. "Women and utterance in contexts of violence : Nehanda, Without a name and The strange virgins by Yvonne Vera." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/1632.
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This dissertation is a study of women and utterance in contexts of violence in the three selected novels written by the late Yvonne Vera: Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), and The Stone Virgins (2002). A study of the representation of women in particular is appropriate because their role in the making of the history of Zimbabwe has been deliberately undermined or ignored by 'patriotic' historians and politicians alike. This study incorporates a historical and post-colonial feminist analysis of women and their empowerment through utterance in Vera's novels. Their achieving utterance is seen as a way of countering a past tendency to focus on women being victims of patriarchal ideologies with little being done to expose the degree and nature of women's resistance against oppressive, socially constructed gender relations. The kind of violence experienced by Vera's women is both physical (rape and murder) and psychological. Two dimensions of utterance have been explored in this study. Firstly, the study examined what the characters can and cannot say about their conditions of suffering. This entailed an examination of their cultural and contextual limitations as well as their personal difficulties. Secondly, the study investigated how Vera, writing some fifteen years after the events she depicts and with the advantage of hindsight, represents her women characters as agents of their own recovery from the violation perpetrated against them. This involved an analysis of Vera's utterance and her thematic concerns, especially her revisioning of history in breaking the silence of her women characters. Positioned in relation to existing critical works on Vera's novels, this study's contribution to the critical debate has been its demonstration of how Vera, through the use of her narrative technique and unique poetic style was able to challenge the conditions of women in the past in a way that has relevance to present-day Zimbabwe and offers possibilities for the future Zimbabwe.<br>Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.
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Douglas, William N. "Futures far and near : the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon." Phd thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/151075.
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Olaf Stapledon is lauded by authors and critics of science fiction as the author of seminal works of twentieth century science fiction, including the early novels, Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), and Star Maker (1937). Stapledon, however, did not consider himself to be a science fiction writer, and drafted these three novels largely in ignorance of genre science fiction. An examination of Stapledon's life reveals him to have been, in essence, a lecturer and public speaker, and a teacher in adult education, in the area of philosophy in particular. Stapledon's approach to these early novels was as a pedagogue and public intellectual. The challenge of reconciling Olaf Stapledon's production of these texts in ignorance of the bases of genre science fiction with their reception as defining pillars of that genre, can be met by illustrating the manner in which Stapledon, through his novels, engaged rigorously with contemporary systems of knowledge, and extrapolated from them potential futures. Nowhere is this more evident than in Stapledon's consistent, and consistently ambivalent, engagement with the theories and ideas of Sigmund Freud. In Last and First Men, Stapledon engages with Darwinian and Freudian accounts of human development, through his use of evolutionary projections of humanity's future as a vehicle to explore the implications of such changes on the individual and their society. In Odd John, Stapledon considers more closely potential changes in the individual psyche which might equip individuals to realise a utopian society, and contrasts these with perceived limitations in humanity's current mental apparatus. In Star Maker, Stapledon explores the nature of the human urge to worship and the significance of this urge for the individual and for society in light of the world view of secular modernity. In these novels Stapledon engages optimistically with futurity, consistently considering and drawing on contemporary systems of knowledge to explore the future implications of potential change. In so doing, Stapledon has created texts which adhere to the tenets of science fiction, and which have demonstrably engaged with issues that science fiction texts into the twenty-first century have continued to explore.
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Thomas, Stuart. "This land is us : aspects of the Plaasroman and hospitality in five post-apartheid Karoo novels." Thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/7923.
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This dissertation investigates five texts: Damon Galgut‟s The Imposter (2008), Anne
Landsman‟s The Devil’s Chimney (1998), Eben Venter‟s My Beautiful Death (1998) and
Trencherman (2008) and Zoë Wicomb‟s David’s Story (2000).
In addition to being written in the post-apartheid era, these five texts are all set wholly or
partially in the Karoo, a semi-desert landscape unique to South Africa. The Karoo is,
however, more than just a common setting onto which their individual stories have been
transposed. It is part of the literary imagination of each text. Within these texts are a number
of fluid interactions between the consciousnesses and the landscapes they portray. Of course,
to attempt to examine these interactions as occurring purely between landscape and
consciousness would be foolhardy. As such, this project investigates these links by
comparing the texts under investigation to the historical literary form of the plaasroman and
by scrutinising them through the theoretical concept of hospitality, as outlined by Jacques
Derrida.
According to J.M. Coetzee term „plaasroman‟ refers to the type of early twentiethcentury
Afrikaans novel which “concerned itself almost exclusively with the farm and
platteland (rural society) and with the Afrikaner‟s painful transition from farmer to
townsman” (1988: 63). This project investigates all five texts in relation to a number of the
concerns common to the plaasroman, including the idea of the farm as a patriarchal idyll, its
valorisation of near-mythical ancestral values and the pushing of black labour to the
peripheries of narrative consciousness. These concerns, along with the fact that the
plaasroman marks out the farm as a fenced off area surrounded by threatening forces, means
that it is an ideal form to include in an investigation involving hospitality
Derrida outlines hospitality, at its most basic level as “the right of a stranger not to be
treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else‟s territory” (Derrida 2007: 246). This
relationship, however, goes further than a simple binary. Both host and guest give and receive
hospitality. From Derrida‟s meditations on the subject come two forms of hospitality:
Conditional and unconditional. The primary distinction between these two kinds of
hospitality is a distinction “between a form of subjectivity constituted through a hostile
process of inclusion and exclusion and one that comes into being in the self‟s pre-reflective
and traumatic exposure, without inhibition, to otherness” (Marais 2009: 275). Unconditional
hospitality is the latter and morally preferable.
In linking the two concepts, this dissertation illustrates the degrees to which each text,
through subverting, or conforming to the conventions of the plaasroman, achieves instances
of unconditional hospitality.<br>Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.
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Johnson, Amy R. "Stranger in the Room: Illuminating Female Identity Through Irish Drama." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/918.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2007.<br>Title from screen (viewed on May 23, 2007) Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-83)