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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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Ambrosini, Richard. "Conrad's fiction as critical discourse." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20971.
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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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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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Morgan, David Ellis. "Pulp literature a re-evalutation [sic] /." Connect to this title online, 2002. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20040820.122551.
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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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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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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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Erhart, Erin Michelle. "England's Dreaming| The Rise and Fall of Science Fiction, 1871-1874." Thesis, Brandeis University, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10103436.
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This dissertation grows out of a conversation between two fields—those of Victorian Literature and Science Fiction (SF). I began this project with a realization that there was a productive overlap between SF and Victorian Studies. In my initial engagement with SF, I was frustrated by the limitations of the field, and by the way that scholars were misreading the 19th century, utilizing broad generalizations about the function of Empire, the subject, technology, and the social, where close readings would have been more productive. Victorian studies supplied a critical and theoretical basis for the interrogation of these topics, and SF gave my reading of the nineteenth century an appreciation for the dynamic nature of the mechanism, and a useful jumping-off point for conversations around futurity, utopia, and the Other. Together, these two fields created a symbiotic theoretical framework that informs the progression of the dissertation.
In this project, I am shifting the grounds of engagement with early SF between two main terms; my aim is to question the establishment of “cognitive estrangement” as the seat the power in SF studies and supplant it with an emphasis on the “novum”. While both terms are indebted to Darko Suvin, I argue that the fixation on cognitive estrangement has blurred the lines of the genre of SF in nonproductive ways, and has needlessly complicated an already complex field. This dissertation is a deep engagement with the SF novels of 1871-2 to establish how the genre was defining itself from the very beginning, and looks to examine how a close-reading of early SF can inform our engagement with the field. Chapter one treats the work of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), chapter two examines Sir George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), chapter three engages with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, and chapter four is an examination of the relationship between the first three novels and Robert Ellis Dudgeon’s Colymbia (1873) and A Voice from Another World (1874) by Wladyslaw Somerville Lach-Szurma (W.S.L.S).
There are four fundamental concerns. The first is that the near simultaneous publication of Chesney, Lytton, and Butler signaled the emergence of SF as a genre, rather than as the isolated texts that had existed prior to this moment. The clustering of the novels of 1871-2 marks the transition of SF concerns from singular outlier events to a generic movement. The second claim is that the “novum”, one of the key aspects of a SF novel, is not just a material component in the text, but is a kind of logic that undergirds these novels. While the novum is often thought of as “the strange thing in a strange world”, I lock onto the early language of Suvin and critics such as Patricia Kerslake and John Rieder to suggest that it is, instead, a cognitive logic that is experimented on within the narrative of the novel. The third claim is fundamentally tied to the second: this foundation logic of the text is technological or mechanical. It is this connection of cognitive logic and technology and the mechanism that situates the novum as a technologic that is experimented on or evolved within the body of an SF novel, and is important because it helps us lock onto how SF is a product of the industrial age. In the break that occurs in 1871, this form of the novum plays a critical role in the development and identification of SF as a genre, and helps to distinguish texts with scientific themes (what I am calling scientific fictions) from those featuring a fundamental technologic that is intrinsic to the development and deployment of the narrative (what will come to be called science fiction).
The fourth and final claim is a product of the function and nature of the novum: and is that SF as a genre not only helps to understand technology and culture, but actively works to define the relationship between the two. Technology is registered as an important influence on culture, and culture shapes the future of technology. This genre is ultimately growing out of the rise of the scientific method, and the logic of the texts reflects that experimental paradigm. The logic of SF is one that experiments with the future, testing the implications of the known world against the possibilities of time, and in doing so, defining the terms of engagement with what the future might bring.
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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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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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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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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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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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Malton, Sara. "Commanding language, linguistic authority and female autonomy in Thomas Hardy's fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ58482.pdf.
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Nas, Aloysia Antonia Sophia Maria. "John Barth's later fiction : intertextual readings, with emphasis on Letters (1979)." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18874.
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This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter I serves as an introduction to intertextuality; it focuses on John Barth's narrative crisis and discusses structuralist and poststructuralist theories of intertextuality. Chapters II, III and IV discuss the agencies of reader, author and text respectively. Chapter II looks at structuralist and poststructuralist notions of reading and John Barth's parodic play with these notions; it also provides an in-depth analysis of the external and internal readers of LETTERS. Chapter III concentrates on the roles of the reader as re-writer and the author as re-arranger and looks closely at the roles of the different narratorial agents in LETTERS. Chapter IV starts off with a discussion of the discourse of the copy in postmodern culture and moves, via poststructuralist and narrativisit mimesis, to different forms of repetition as developed by Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Chapter V focuses on John Barth's rethinking of notions of authorship and authority. It first gives an historical introduction to authorship, starting off in the Middle Ages, and then moves, via eighteenth-century Samuel Richard, son and nineteenth-century Edgar Allan Poe and Soren Kierkegaard, to twentieth-century· notions of authorship as developed by Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Culler,to end with Jacques Derrida's signature theory. Bibliography: p. 340-356.
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Schellenberg, Elizabeth A. "Failed plots: Authority and the social circle in eighteenth-century fiction." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/7729.
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Theoreticians of the early novel have canonized as realistic those fictions that portray the desirous individual in sustained tension with his or her social environment. Such fictions bring irreconcilable and subversive voices into conflict, and privilege a strongly linear, teleological plot. This critical focus has contributed to the dismissal of a substantial body of eighteenth-century British fiction which adopts alternative structures in order to express different ideological alignments. In particular, a study of pairs of works by authors who may in the first case be relative unknowns, but in the second have become more established and authoritative writers seeking to meet audience expectations while balancing or competing an oeuvre, reveals divergent responses to a climate of philosophical uncertainty, social flux, and changing notions of authorship. The later work of each pair--Samuel Richardson's sequel to Pamela, his Sir Charles Grandison following upon Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Amelia after Tom Jones, and Sarah Fielding's sequel, Volume the Last, to her Adventures of David Simple--reflects its context of successful author, established audience, and preceding text by reinscribing the isolated protagonist within a stable social circle modelled on the intimate conversational group. Thus these works share a use of the circle as formal image at several levels of structure, ranging from metaphors of clockworks and gravitational systems, to "conversation-pieces" as the fundamental units of plot, to an overall impulse towards consensus and cyclical stasis that replaces the momentum supplied by conflict in their predecessor texts. Two examples taken from pre-novelistic genres--William Congreve's The Double-Dealer as a comedy self-consciously in search of a new form that will adequately embody the emerging ideal of conversational relations, and John Bunyan's sequel to The Pilgrim's Progress as a feminized, communal, and static rewriting of the individual's struggle to win salvation in a hostile world--suggest the preoccupations informing the conservative fictions studied in the thesis. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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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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Wakota, John. "The making and remaking of gender relations in Tanzanian fiction." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86389.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study examines the fictional representation of gender relations in novels set during five historical periods in Tanzania – the pre-colonial, colonial, nationalism, Ujamaa, and the current neoliberalism period – each of which is marked by important shifts in the nation’s economic contours. Analysing novels written in both Swahili and English, it tracks the shifts in fictionalized household and extra-household gender relations; analyses how the community and the state (colonial and post-colonial) variously map and remap the way male and female characters relate; and interrogates how male and female characters variously accommodate, appropriate, bargain with and/or resist the shifts. The study employs the concepts of power and intersectionality to analyse how selected authors depict gender relations as a product of intersecting identity categories, complex socio-economic shifts and historical processes. Defining labour as productive work done for wage and fulfilment of gender roles, the study argues that labour is one of the major aspects shaping power relations between men and women. It reveals that labour is the major aspect in which the economic shifts have had great impact on gender relations as represented in Tanzanian fiction. As an aspect of power, labour is also the area within which gender relations have continuously been negotiated and contested throughout the fictionalized history. In negotiating or resisting given economic shifts, both male and female characters variously deconstruct and or endorse existing notions of power, labour, and gender relations. The study shows that the cross-fertilization among the periods, the interaction between gender and other identity categories (such as race, religion, class, and age), the synergy between indigenous patriarchy and other patriarchies (such as colonial and capitalist), and, the interactions between global and local dynamics account for the complex and contradictory nature of the shifts in gender relations throughout the nation’s history. Consequently, the study’s major observation is that across the fictionalized history, characters variously seek to maintain and or transform existing gender relations and or discard or restore past gender relations.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Dié studie ondersoek die fiksionele verteenwoordiging van geslagsverhoudings in romans wat gestel word gedurende vyf historiese periodes in Tanzanië – pre-koloniale, koloniale, nasionalisties, Ujamaa en die huidige neoliberalisme – elkeen waarvan gekenmerk is deur belangrike verskuiwings in die nasie se ekonomiese kontoere. Deur die analisering van romans wat in Engels en Swahili geskryf is volg dit die verskuiwings in fiktiewe huishouding- en ekstrahuishoudelike geslagsverhoudings; dit analiseer hoe die gemeenskap en die staat (koloniale en post-koloniale) die manier van hoe manlike en vroulike karakters verband hou verskillend en afwisselend kaart en herkaart; dit interrogeer hoe manlike en vroulike karakters verskillend die verskuiwings akkommodeer, bewillig en weerstaan. Die studie maak gebruik van die konsepte van krag en intersektionaliteit om te analiseer hoe die geselekteerde skrywers geslagsverhoudings verteenwoordig as ʼn produk van kruisende identiteitskategorieë, komplekse sosio-ekonomiese verskuiwings en historiese prosesse. Arbeid word as produktiewe werk wat gedoen word vir loon en geslagsrolle definieer, en die studie argumenteer dat arbeid een van die hoof aspekte is wat magsverhoudings bepaal tussen mans en vrouens. Dit onthul dat arbeid die hoof aspek is in die ekonomiese verskuiwings wat ʼn groot impak gehad het in geslagsverhoudings in Tanzaniese fiksie. As ʼn aspek van mag is dit ook die area waarin geslagsverhouding aanmekaar onderhandel en betwis word dwarsdeur die fiktiewe geskiedenis. Wanneer dit kom by die onderhandel en twis van ekonomiese verskuiwings is dit beide manlike en vroulike karakters wat afwisselend bestaande idees van mag, arbeid en geslagsverhoudings dekonstrueer en endosseer. Die studie bewys dat kruisbestuiwing tussen die periodes, die interaksies tussen geslag en ander identiteitskategorieë (soos ras, geloof, klas en ouderdom), die sinergie tussen patriargie en ander patriargies (soos koloniale en kapitalistiese) en die interaksies tussen globale en plaaslike dinamika verantwoordelik is vir die komplekse en teenstrydige natuur van die wisselinge in geslagsverhoudings regdeur die nasie se geskiedenis. Gevolglik is die studie se hoofobservasie dat die karakters regdeur die geskiedenis op verskeie maniere poog om bestaande geslagsverhoudings te behou of te transformeer of om vorige geslagsverhoudings te herstel of verwyder.
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Rezek, Joseph Paul. "Tales from elsewhere fiction at a proximate distance in the anglophone Atlantic /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1925765691&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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McLeod, Melissa. "Sounds of terror hearing ghosts in Victorian fiction /." unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11282007-112908/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Title from file title page. Michael Galchinsky, committee chair; Calvin Thomas, Lee Anne Richardson, committee members. Electronic text (181 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 7, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 174-181).
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Brocklebank, Lisa M. "Presentiments, sympathies and signs : minds in the age of fiction---reading and the limits of reason in Victorian Britain." View abstract/electronic edition; access limited to Brown University users, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3318292.
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Stoyan, Sydney Lyn. "The widow's might: Law and the widow in British fiction, 1689-1792." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6238.
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Repeatedly in eighteenth-century fiction, the widow embodies a narrative agency that has as its actual counterpart the directive relation to property granted to widows by English law: unlike a wife, a widow had a separate legal identity and could hold real property as could a man. Common law dower granted her a life interest in her husband's estate, but over the course of the eighteenth century, dower was increasingly barred by jointure, a monetary provision negotiated in the marriage settlement. Jointure was contractual in nature, often unconnected to land, subject to the ideological vagaries of the Courts of Equity, and violable in ways that dower was not. Running parallel to this legal alteration is a demographic decline in the rate of remarriage for widows. These historical phenomena together provoke speculation about the widow's disadvantaging through jointure over dower. From the perspective of a feminist reading, the replacement of a common law right with a discretionary claim, and its corollary substitution of mobile for real property, indicate an anxiety about the widow's potential might in accumulating wealth in land. This uneasiness infuses contemporary representations of widowhood. Satirical treatments both mock the widow's lubricity and apprehend a re-allocation of property through remarriage. Conduct manuals advocate the strictest modesty to contain the widow's energy. The thesis elucidates, within the context of these representations, the legal and historical developments affecting the widow and reads, accordingly, a range of British fictions. Short fictions by Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Eliza Haywood, and novels by Frances Sheridan, Sarah Scott and Clara Reeve are analyzed to assess a widow's entitlement to desire, to examine her capacity for narrative agency, and to question her security in a transactional economy. Although the widow exerts a consequential narrative authority in the texts under consideration, a familiarity with eighteenth-century law reveals what the novelists imply: the contemporary valorization of acquisitive inclination over disinterested civic virtue, and its legal parallel of unchartered contract over entrenched status right, register a diminution of the widow's proprietary might.
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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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Cave, David P. "The treatment of World War Two in English fiction 1940-1990." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.310275.
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Hayball, Constance Nora May. "Some aspects of the treatment of India in modern English fiction." Thesis, Loughborough University, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.328816.
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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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Foulds, Alexandra Laura. "Gothic monster fiction and the 'novel-reading disease', 1860-1900." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30684/.
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This thesis scrutinises the complex ‘afterlife’ of sensation fiction in the wake of the 1860s and ‘70s, after the end of the period that critics have tended to view as the heyday of literary sensationalism. It identifies and explores the consistent framing of sensation fiction as a pathological ‘style of writing’ by middle-class critics in the periodical press, revealing how such responses were moulded by new and emerging medical research into the nervous system, the cellular structure of the body, and the role played by germs in the transmission of diseases. Envisioned as a disease characterised by its new immersive and affective reading process, sensation fiction was believed to be infecting its readers. It infiltrated their nervous systems, instigating a process of metamorphosis that gradually depleted their physical and mental integrity and reduced them to a weakened, ‘flabby’, ‘limp’ state. The physical boundaries of the body, however, were not the only limits that sensation fiction seemed to wilfully disregard. ‘[S]preading in all directions’, it contaminated other modes, other media, and other kinds of recreational entertainment, making them equally sensational and pathological. One of these modes was Gothic monster fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, which was repeatedly labelled ‘sensational’ and described as generating the same cardiovascular responses as works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry Wood. This infection of fin de siècle Gothic fiction by literary sensationalism can be gauged in the plots and monsters that those texts portray. Gothic monster narratives at the end of the nineteenth century are shaped by the concerns at the heart of middle-class commentators’ responses to sensation fiction, and by the medical lexicon employed to vocalise these anxieties. Monstrosity is linked to contagion and stimulation, as the monster seems to pollute all those with whom it comes into contact. It triggers a process of degeneration and debilitation akin to that associated with the reading of sensation fiction, producing a host of ‘shocked’, nervous, or hysterical characters. Encounters with the monster are linked to recreational reading or other kinds of behaviour that such reading became associated with, such as thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and illicit sexual desire. The result is a group of texts in which the monster embodies the same threat to boundaries, as well as individual, and, at times, national health that middle-class reviewers associated with literary sensationalism.
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Sparks, Tabitha. "Family practices : medicine, gender, and literature in Victorian culture /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9319.
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Harvey, Alison Dean. "Irish realism women, the novel, and national politics,1870-1922 /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1417800181&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Hedler, Elizabeth. "Stories of Canada : national identity in late-nineteenth-century English-Canadian fiction /." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/HedlerE2003.pdf.
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Schofield, Emma. "Independent Wales? : the impact of devolution on Welsh fiction in English." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2014. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/71581/.
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This thesis traces the relation between Anglophone Welsh fiction and politics, in light of the campaign for, and introduction, of devolution. Focusing primarily on the period 1970 – 2011, the thesis analyses a range of novels, short stories and journal articles produced in this period. The Introduction begins with an analysis of the history of devolution in Wales and considers theories of nationalism proposed by theorists including Benedict Anderson and Raymond Williams, both of whom suggest that heightened awareness of a wider national community is integral to the development of a cohesive nationalist impulse. Chapter I commences with an analysis of the relation between literature and politics in the years prior to the 1979 referendum on Welsh devolution. Taking as its starting point Fredric Jameson’s theory of political allegory in literature, this chapter considers the way in which the presentation of politics in Anglophone Welsh fiction becomes gradually more overt by the close of the 1970s. Chapter II examines the way in which Anglophone Welsh fiction writers responded to the outcome of the 1979 referendum, alongside other political events of the 1980s such as the Falklands War and widespread industrial decline. Chapter III charts the development of the relation between fiction and politics in 1990s Wales, suggesting that the years preceding the 1997 referendum on devolution witnessed a more overt engagement between Anglophone Welsh fiction and politics than had been evident in the 1970s. The final chapter argues that in the wake of devolution fiction from Wales has responded by presenting an increasingly diverse and multi-faceted image of Wales, characterised by a more overt engagement with politics and nationalism. The Conclusion considers how the changes outlined in this thesis relate to wider cultural developments in Wales and suggests how this research may be expanded to incorporate broader areas of the arts in Wales.
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Casero, Eric E. "Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness in American Fiction, 1980-2010." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/38.
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Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing their characters to live in mental worlds of their own making. While the novel, as a genre, often depicts alienation as a condition deriving from a character’s status as a social outcast, the texts featured in this study treat it as a condition inherent to consciousness, derived from what their creators envision as an inevitable separation of mind from world. Rather than bemoan alienation as a loss of social connectedness, these texts portray it as inherent to mental life.
The chapters of this dissertation explore the particular visions of alienation that emerge in each of these texts. In a chapter on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I argue that Howie, the novel’s protagonist, views his mind as a machine that operates according to self-sufficient, automatic processes. My analysis of David Markson’s final novels demonstrates that Markson portrays artistic creation as a process through which individual consciousness is isolated from society. David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion treats alienation as a general human condition, as Wallace’s interests in loneliness and solipsism derive, I argue, from his assumptions about the individualized nature of consciousness. Finally, in a chapter on The Truman Show, I argue that the film’s sense of paranoia stems from its protagonist’s sense of being alone in his worldview. I thus present a corpus of works that maintain a close, limited focus on singular fictional minds, shutting out social and physical environments in order to depict the mind as a cloistered, self-enclosed entity. My analysis highlights the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of these narratives render consciousness as an isolating force, stranding fictional characters on mental islands of their own making.
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Nabutanyi, Edgar Fred. "Representations of troubled childhoods in selected post-1990 African fiction in English." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/79874.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study explores representations of troubled childhoods in post-1990 African narratives. Defining troubled childhoods as the experiences of children exposed to different forms of violations including physical, psychological, sexual and emotional abuse, the study reflects on depictions of such experiences in a selection of contemporary African fictional texts in English. The study‘s central thesis is that, while particular authors‘ deployment of affective writing techniques offers implicit analysis of troubled childhoods, the knowledge about this reality that such literary texts produce and place in the public sphere resonates with readers because of the narrative textures that both make knowledge concerning such childhoods accessible and create a sense of the urgent plight of such children. They render troubled childhoods grieveable. The study delineates three attributes of the selected texts that explain why such fictions can be considered significant from both social and aesthetic perspectives: namely, their foregrounding of intertwined vectors of violation and/or vulnerability; their skilful use of multi-layered narrative voices and their creation of specific posttraumatic damage and survival tropes. The four main thesis chapters are organised thematically rather than conceptually or theoretically, because representations of troubled childhoods are contextually and experientially entangled. Using Maria Pia Lara‘s notion of ―illocutionary force‖ and specific aspects of trauma and affect theory, the study focuses centrally on how the units of narration construct persuasive and convincing depictions of troubled childhoods while using fiction to convene platforms for reflection on the phenomena of child victims of war violence, abusive parenting, sexual predation and sexual violation.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die studie ondersoek voorstellings van gekwelde kinder-ervaringswêrelde in post-1990 narratiewe deur skrywers van Afrika. Gekwelde kinder-ervaringswêrelde word gedefinieer as die ondervindinge van kinders wat blootgestel is aan verskillende vorms van skending, insluitend fisiese, psigologiese, seksuele en emosionele skending. Met hierdie definisie in gedagte reflekteer die studie op gelselekteerde uitbeeldings van sulke ervarings in hedendaagse Afrika-fiksie in Engels. Die studie se sentrale tesis is dat, terwyl sekere outeurs se ontplooiïng van affektiewe skryftegnieke implisiete analise van gekwelde kinder-ervaringswêrelde bied, resoneer die kennis oor hierdie realiteit wat sulke literêre tekste oplewer en in die publieke sfeer plaas met die leespubliek omdat die struktuur van die narratiewe die verskynsel van kwellende kinder-ervarings onthul en bewustheid van die dringende aard van die verskynsel bemoontlik. Sulke kinderlewens word op hierdie manier treurbaar [grievable] gemaak. Die studie delinieer drie eienskappe van die gekose tekste wat verduidelik waarom hierdie tekste vanuit beide sosiale en estetiese perspektiewe as beduidend beskou kan word, naamlik die verstrengelde vektors van verkragting en kwesbaarheid wat hulle op die voorgrond bring, hul bekwame gebruik van veellagige narratiewe stemme en hul skepping van spesifieke posttraumatiese skade- en oorlewingstrope. Die vier middelste tesis-hoofstukke is tematies in plaas van konsepsueel of teoreties georganiseer, omdat voorstellings van gekwelde kinder-ervaringswêrelde kontekstueel- en ervaringsverstrik is. Met die gebruik van Maria Pia Lara se begrip van illocutionary force en spesifieke aspekte van trauma- en inwerkingsteorie fokus die studie hoofsaaklik op hoe die narratiewe eenhede oorhalende en oortuigende afbeeldings van gekwelde kinder-ervaringswêrelde konstrueer terwyl hulle fiksie gebruik om platforms vir refleksie op die fenomeen van kinderslagoffers van oorlogsgeweld, misbruikende ouerskap en seksuele- predasie en verkragting byeen te bring.
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Strasen, Christian T. "A Postcard From the Future| Technology, Desire, and Myth in Contemporary Science Fiction." Thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10013970.
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This thesis argues that modern, post-apocalyptic science fiction functions as a projected analysis of the author’s contemporary world. This insight is used to chart the historical trajectory of the spread of automaticity, the reduction of objects, and the loss of historical memory. The Introduction introduces readers to both the literary and critical histories of science fiction, contextualizing the worlds that George R. Stewart, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood write in. Chapter One analyzes George R. Stewart’s 1949 novel Earth Abides, using it to demonstrate how the growing trend of automaticity leads toward a reduction of physical objects, and a misunderstanding of politics. Chapter Two uses Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 novel The Lathe of Heaven to reveal an acceleration of automaticity and reduction of objects though the manipulation of human desire. This, in turn, leads to a loss of historical memory via Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive desublimation. Chapter Three charts the effects that the advent of the virtual has had on automaticity and the manipulation of human desire through an engagement with Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake.
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El, Inglizi Najwa Yousif. "Negotiating the gothic in the fiction of Thomas Hardy." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2003. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/112/.
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The purpose of this research is to investigate Thomas Hardy’s relation to the Gothic tradition, especially that deriving from the classic period 1760-mid-1820s. The main novels chosen for such an investigation are Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Parallels with the following texts form the heart of the thesis: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin, Caleb Williams, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. This investigation has been instigated by three major elements noted in the criticism on Hardy’s literary art in general and on his tragedies in particular. First, although Hardy scholars employ terminology pertaining to the Gothic and romance genres in describing Hardy’s plots, characters and settings, very few of them make a direct and explicit connection to the Gothic novel. Second, the few who do broach the Gothic elements in Hardy’s fiction limit their understanding of the kind of Gothic Hardy employs mainly to the second quarter of the nineteenth century and onwards. Moreover, they seem to be more willing to admit such influence in his minor works, obfuscating the influence of Gothic discourse on his major novels. Therefore, this research will attempt to investigate Hardy’s involvement with Gothic discourse and examine the ways in which the characteristic settings, drama and character-types of such discourse are domesticated, complicated and made more subtle in Hardy’s work. Finally, it envisages further investigation into Hardy’s work in its relation to his architectural knowledge and his philosophic views of life in general, and his views of humanity’s place in it in particular.
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Scott, Tania. "Locating Ireland in the fantastic fiction of Lord Dunsany." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2630/.
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This thesis will locate the fantastic fiction of Lord Dunsany in a tradition of Irish writing, while simultaneously examining representations of Ireland within the texts themselves. Dunsany has been regarded – until now – as a marginal figure in Irish literature, but this study will show that he deserves a place in the canon. My research will demonstrate that, from his early involvement in the Abbey Theatre through to his late introspective novels set in Ireland, Dunsany throughout his life engages with Irish literary and cultural traditions. The first chapter will focus on Lord Dunsany’s theatrical writings which have been rarely staged since his death and have attracted little attention from scholars. By examining performances of the plays in Ireland and beyond, the links between the playwright and the national theatre will become clear. Building on this work on the plays, Chapter Two and moves on to an analysis of Dunsany’s novels – including The King of Elfland’s Daughter, his best known work – and places them within a historical context of conflict both at home in Ireland and throughout Europe. The next chapter looks at Dunsany’s later novels set in Ireland and questions why it is at this point in the 1930s, after decades of writing fantastic fiction, that the author chooses to locate his works in his own land. The same themes and ideas found in the novels are also prominent in Dunsany’s short stories which form the focus of chapters four and five. Chapter Four examines the stories set in Pegāna, the first tales he wrote and those which made Dunsany’s reputation as a writer of high fantasy, and locates their other-worldliness within the real world of twentieth-century Ireland. The last chapter deals with the later short stories, and brings Dunsany’s work up to date by using recent work on Irish postcolonialism and theories of Empire to analyse these narratives. The conclusion will consider Dunsany’s work overall, by way of close readings of texts from the beginning and end of his career which will allow us to trace the development of Ireland as a concept and as a literary influence throughout his writings.
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Long-Innes, F. A. V. "Stranger than fiction : the case histories of Sigmund Freud." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/10821.
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Bibliography: leaves 201-209.The general aim of this study is to arrive at a critical assessment of the cultural-historical significance of Freud' s major case histories, through a close examination of three of the most famous: the cases of "Dora", "Schreber" and the "WolfMan". My investigation of the case histories themselves is prefaced, in Chapter One, by a selective review of some major strands in the recent critical tradition.
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Kagai, Ezekiel Kimani. "Encountering strange lands : migrant texture in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86484.
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Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study engages with the complete novelistic oeuvre of the Zanzibari-born author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose fiction is dedicated to the theme of migration. With each novel, however, Gurnah deploys innovative stylistic features as an analytic frame to engage with his signature topic. From his first novel to his eighth, Gurnah offers new insights into relocation and raises new questions about what it means to be a migrant or a stranger in inhospitable circumstances and how such conditions call for a negotiation of hospitable space. What gives each of his works a distinct aesthetic appeal is the artistic resourcefulness and versatility with which he frames his narratives, in order to situate them within their historical contexts. This allows him to interrogate the motives behind his characters’ actions (or behind their inaction). Gurnah, therefore, employs a variety of narrative perspectives that not only challenge the reader in the task of interpreting his complex works, but which also allow for the pleasure of carrying out this task. In its exploration of migrant subjectivities and their multiple and varied negotiations to create enabling spaces, this thesis shows how Gurnah’s fiction deploys various artistic strategies as possible ways of thinking about individual identity and social relations with others. In short, this thesis explores how Gurnah’s texts become discursive tools for understanding the complexity of migrancy and cultural exchanges along the Swahili coast, in Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean, and in the UK.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis is ‘n studie van die geheelwerk van die Zanzibar-gebore skrywer Abdulrazak Gurnah, wie se fiksiewerk gewy is aan die tema van migrasie. Hoewel daar so ‘n deurlopende en kenmerkende tema in die geheelwerk is, ontwikkel die skrywer stilistiese vernuwing in elk van die individuele romans. Vanaf sy eerste roman tot en met sy agtste en mees onlangse, bied Gurnah se romans aan die leser nuwe insigte in die tema van verhuising, en die romans vra elkeen nuwe vrae oor wat dit beteken om ‘n migrant of vreemdeling te wees in onverwelkomende omgewings. Die romans wil ook vra wat die opsies is vir die individu om sulke omgewings meer verwelkomend te ervaar, of meer verwelkomend te maak. Wat Gurnah se werk so uitsonderlik maak en wat elke individuele roman ‘n kenmerkende estetiese eienskap gee, is sy vernuf en veelsydigheid as skrywer, en veral sy vermoë om sy verhale te historiseer. Hierdie historisering stel hom in staat om die beweegredes van sy karakters en hulle aksies (en dikwels ook gebrek aan aksies) te verken sowel as te bevraagteken. Gurnah maak gebruik van ‘n aantal estetiese perspektiewe wat nie alleen ‘n uitdaging stel aan die leser nie, maar wat terselfdertyd ‘n hoogs bevredigende leesaktiwiteit moontlik maak. Hierdie tesis is ‘n ondersoek na die aard van Gurnah se werk, en veral die verkenning van die innerlike wereld van die verhuisde, en die veelvoudige verskeidenheid van onderhandelings wat sulke individue het met hulle omgewing. Die tesis verken die maniere waarop Gurnah se tekste beskou kan word as kreatiewe handleidings met die doel om die kompleksiteite van verhuising en migrasie te begryp; en veral verhuising en kulturele wisselwerkinge aan die Swahili-kus, sowel as Zanzibar, die groter Indiese Oseaan-wereld en ook die Verenigde Koninkryk.
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Parr, Celeste. "Gurov and Anna: melodrama, metafiction, and the construction of narratives in film and fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=97049.
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This thesis contains an original feature screenplay entitled Gurov and Anna, and an accompanying scholarly essay. The essay examines some of the themes found in my screenplay, with a focus on anxiety about the creation and consumption of narratives, and situates them within a grander literary, dramatic, and cinematic tradition, as well as in relation to the scholarly writings of Patricia Waugh and Peter Brooks.Cette thèse contient un scénario original intitulé Gurov and Anna, ainsi qu'un texte d'accompagnement. Le texte d'accompagnement décrit quelques-uns des thèmes présents dans mon scénario, en mettant l'accent sur l'anxiété liée à la création et la lecture de récits et les situe dans un contexte étendu de traditions littéraires, dramatiques, et cinématographiques, ainsi qu'en relation avec les textes de Patricia Waugh et Peter Brooks.
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Forbes, Joan S. "Women resisting romance : anti-romantic discourse in English courtship fiction, 1775-1820." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364368.
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Cheyette, Bryan. "An overwhelming question : Jewish stereotyping in English fiction and society, 1875-1914." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1986. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2948/.
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This thesis sets out to examine the nature of modern Jewish stereotyping in English society with reference to a wide range of English fiction which, for the most part, has been previously undocumented in these terms. Instead of a purely literary analysis of the fictional Jewish stereotype, this thesis places the Jewish stereotype in a specific ideological and historical context which is then related to a given writer-or group of writers—and their fiction. Two chapters, moreover, demonstrate the material results of Jewish stereotyping in English society with reference to the internalisation and institutionalisation of Jewish stereotyping by British Jewry and the AngloJewish novel. The variety and impact of Jewish stereotyping is shown to encompass the ideologies of liberalism, social Darwinism, Imperialism, antisemitism, proto-Zionism, Socialism and mainstream versions of sexuality. The concluding chapter relates the modern Jewish stereotype, which was formed after the 1870s, to a more general ahistorical mythic view of the Jew. In particular, this chapter refers to the links between modern Jewish stereotyping and the traditional Christian view of the Jew. With reference to a wide range of writers, more general questions are raised in this chapter concerning the continuity of Jewish stereotyping and the choice of a given stereotype by a particular social or literary group.
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Altmaier, Catherine. "The Gospel of Cosmopolitanism: Conflict Resolution in Barbara Kingsolver's Fiction." TopSCHOLAR®, 2006. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/439.
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Despite Barbara Kingsolver's ability to create unique characters and storylines, two factors remain constant throughout each of her novels: strong female protagonists and conflict resolution. Though conflict exists in almost all fiction, the way that Kingsolver's characters deal with their situations often speaks louder than any other aspect of her writing. Moreover, though her characters often vary wildly from story to story, their methods of conflict resolution seem to undoubtedly connect them. Through her continuing desire to emphasize "the question of individualism and communal identity," {Reading Group Guides) Kingsolver often promotes the ideas of cosmopolitanism, which have recently been articulated by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Appiah argues that cosmopolitanism can be represented by two main ideas: "One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship," while the other is "that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance" {Cosmopolitanism xv). Though Appiah presents a compelling rationale for cosmopolitanism in postcolonial international relations, Kingsolver applies the same theories not only to global relationships but to personal conflict as well. While each of Kingsolver's novels could be explored for the theories of cosmopolitanism they demonstrate, The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer provide the best foundation for an examination of their broad applications of cosmopolitanism. Within The Poisonwood Bible, Orleanna, Leah, Rachel, and Adah Price are forced to deal with the international issues concerning the United States and the Congo, which directly affect their lives, as well as personal conflicts that range from quarrelling sisters to death and divorce. Throughout each struggle they face, they regularly apply at least one aspect of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, their most effective moments of conflict resolution come when they more precisely adhere to the tenets of cosmopolitanism. In Prodigal Summer, however, Kingsolver is primarily exploring the use of cosmopolitanism in more personal matters through the story of Lusa Landowski Widener. Though Lusa is not involved with any kind of international politics, it is the ideologies behind cosmopolitanism that allows her to reclaim her life after the loss of her husband while taking responsibility for her choices and becoming more accepting of those she does not understand. Appiah argues that, "A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices" ("Case" 30). Though Kingsolver would agree, she would further contend that such an idea should be more than a doctrine of "global ethics." Instead, cosmopolitanism should be applied to common, every day decisions in order to make greater change in the world. In The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver demonstrates the efficacy of such an application of cosmopolitanism.
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Roach, Katherine. "Between magic and reason : science in 19th century popular fiction." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2011. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13687/.
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The scientist in fiction is much maligned. The mad, bad scientist has framed much of the debate about literary representations of science and with good reason since he is a towering icon of popular culture. Yet, I will propose that an equally preeminent figure provides an alternative model of science in fiction. This is the detective. Links between developing scientific disciplines and the emerging genre of detective fiction have been well described to date. Yet the history of the detective as scientific icon has not been told, particularly not as it engages with the history of the mad scientist. These two paragons of modem culture developed from a groundswell of gothic narrative and imagery that emerged in the late 18th century and continued to entertain and challenge audiences throughout the 19th century, as they still do to this day. My aim is to recover some of the complexity of past public images of science, and the understandings that such icons relate to, as they develop and meander through a variety of 19th century fictions. In a series of time slices I relate these figures, their iconography and narratives, to contemporary debates about science and follow through the elements that each generation retains, remoulds and claims for their own time. Ultimately, I hope to show that an panalysis of the mad scientist alongside other fictional scientific figures provides a far more nuanced picture of potential meanings, than the negative and fearful response that he is often assumed to represent. This is significant because both these icons are current in popular culture today and as such are part and parcel of the present pool of cultural resources that provides tools for thinking about science and society in the 21st century.