Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English, Literatures in. English literature Realism in literature'

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1

Rourke, Warren Jeremy. "K. Sello Duiker's realism: form, critique, and floating kingdoms." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/27551.

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Before drawing together composite elements from his works of novelistic art, as well as his life in writing, the intention of this thesis is to argue that Duiker's realism is an 'authentic' one. Furthermore, Duiker's 'commitment' as an authentic literary realist is to 'articulate' an oppositional world outlook that I am codifying as 'alter-native'. The alter-nativism is expressed not only by the 'interplay' of the 'lumpen' protagonists of the novels but by Duiker himself in the extra-generic marginalia to his short literary career. In order to give 'value' to the contention of this thesis as a whole I will utilize a number of theorists working critically with the relation between language and consciousness, and therefore, as I argue, the 'zero point' of social being.
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2

Heady, Emily Walker. "Conversion in crisis realism and religious experience in the Victorian novel /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3167276.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2005.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 3, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 1007. Chairperson: Patrick Brantlinger.
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3

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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4

Ue, Wai Hung Tom. "Victims of Circumstances: Victorian Realism and the Transnational Narratives of Dickens, Daudet, and Gissing." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=97261.

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Drawing on Hans Robert Jauss' theory of the horizon of expectations, I examine a character type that George Gissing identifies in the title of his short story "A Victim of Circumstances" (1893) as it appears in four works: Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), Alphonse Daudet's Jack (1876), Gissing's Workers in the Dawn (1880) and Veranilda (1903). This thesis reveals how these novelists converse about individual agency and deterministic circumstances. It argues that these three Victorian novelists repeatedly subvert simplistic readings of their characters as passive victims and, in this way, suggest the greater importance of perceptive social reading as a way of dealing with adverse circumstances. It thus illuminates Gissing's status as a reader and writer who is heavily influenced by his contemporaries, and sheds light, to a limited extent, on the impacts of both Dickens on French literature and Daudet on Victorian British literature.
Par l'entremise du cadre théorique d'horizon des attentes développé par Hans Robert Jauss, cette thèse examine le type de personnage que George Gissing caractérise dans le titre de son conte "A Victim of Circumstances" (1893), et ce, dans quatre oeuvres: Bleak House (1953) de Charles Dickens, Jack (1876) d'Alphonse Daudet et de Gissing, Workers in the Dawn (1880) et Veranilda (1903). La thèse met en évidence le discours de ces écrivains sur les choix de l'individu et les circonstances déterministes. L'argument avancé dans la thèse est que ces trois romanciers de l'époque victorienne résistent couramment à une lecture simpliste qui représenterait leurs personnages comme des victimes passives, et ainsi soulignent l'importance d'une mise en contexte social de la lecture afin de permettre la compréhension de circonstances difficiles. La thèse révèle que Gissing est à la fois un lecteur et un écrivain fortement influencé par ses contemporains. De plus, elle examine, dans un petit échantillon de textes, l'influence de Dickens sur la littérature française et celle de Daudet sur la littérature britannique de l'époque victorienne.
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5

Murfin, Audrey Dean. "Stories without end a reexamination of Victorian suspense /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2008.

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6

Bhattacharya, Sourit. "The crisis of modernity : realism and the postcolonial Indian novel." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/97322/.

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This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and development have given rise to. This condition underlies a historical crisis which is manifest in various kinds of catastrophic events – famine, peasant insurgency, caste violence, communal riot, state repression, and so on. By analysing three of these historical events – the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977) – this thesis argues that a careful reading of the dialectic between event and crisis can offer crucial insights into the conditions of postcolonial modernity. It claims that novels that register these events are able to capture the event-crisis dialectic through their use of form and mode. Socially committed writers adopt the realist form to represent the historical aspects and traumatising consequences of the events. However, because the nature, form, and orientation of these events are different, their realisms undergo immense stylistic improvisation. These stylistic shifts are shaped primarily by the writers’ adapting of various literary modes to the specific requirements (i.e. the historical context). Modes are chosen to represent and historicise the specific character and appearance of an event. In order to represent the Bengal famine, the thesis argues, Bhabani Bhattacharya and Amalendu Chakraborty use analytical-affective and metafictional modes, while Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya deploy quest and urban fantastic modes to register the Naxalbari Movement and its aftermath. For the Emergency, writers such as Salman Rushdie, O. V. Vijayan, and Arun Joshi use magical, grotesque and mythical modes, and Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry employ critical realist modes, defined sharply by the writers’ class- and caste-based perspectives. These modes shape the realisms in the respective texts and transform realist literary form into a highly experimental and heterogeneous matter. Contrary to the prevailing academic belief that modernity breeds modernism, the thesis posits that, in the postcolonial Indian context, the conditions of modernity have provoked a historically conscious, experimental, and modernistic form of ‘crisis realism’.
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7

Kennedy, Michael P. J. "The short stories of Hugh Garner: Ground-level realism within the Canadian short story tradition." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/21385.

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8

Hakala, Marjorie R. "Are all the fairies dead? : fairy tales and place in Victorian realism /." Connect to online version, 2006. http://ada.mtholyoke.edu/setr/websrc/pdfs/www/2006/151.pdf.

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9

Christianson, Frank Q. "Realism and the cult of altruism : philanthropic fiction in nineteeth-century America and Britain /." View online version; access limited to Brown University users, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3174588.

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10

Wright, Benjamin Jude. ""Of That Transfigured World" : Realism and Fantasy in Victorian Literature." Scholar Commons, 2013. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4617.

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"Of That Transfigured World" identifies a generally unremarked upon mode of nineteenth-century literature that intermingles realism and fantasy in order to address epistemological problems. I contend that works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde maintain a realist core overlaid by fantastic elements that come from the language used to characterize the core narrative or from metatexts or paratexts (such as stories that characters tell). The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with the problems of representation and the ability of literature to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, each of these authors relies on the fantastic in order to reach the kinds of meaning nineteenth-century realism strives for. My critical framework is derived from the two interrelated discourses of sacred space theology and cultural geography, focusing primarily on the terms topos and chora which I figure as parallel to realism and fantasy. These terms, gleaned from Aristotle and Plato, function to express two interweaving concepts of space that together construct our sense of place. Topos, as defined by Belden C. Lane, refers to "a mere location, a measurable, quantifiable point, neutral and indifferent" whereas chora refers to place as "an energizing force, suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our lives." In the narratives I examine, meaning is constructed via the fantastic interpretations (chora) of realistically portrayed events (topos). The writers I engage with use this dynamic to strategically address pressing epistemological concerns relating to the purpose of art and its relationship to truth. My dissertation examines the works of Dickens, the Brontës, Pater, and Wilde through the lens of this conceptual framework, focusing on how the language that each of these writers uses overlays chora on top of topos. In essence each of these writers uses imaginative language to transfigure the worlds they describe for specific purposes. For Dickens these fantastic hermeneutics allow him to transfigure world into one where the "familiar" becomes "romantic," where moral connections are clear, and which encourages the moral imagination necessary for empathy to take root. Charlotte and Emily Brontës's transfigurations highlight the subjectivity inherent in representation. For Pater, that transfigured world is aesthetic experience and the way our understanding of the "actual world" of topos is shaped by it. Oscar Wilde's transfigured world is by far the most radical, for in the end that transfigured world ceases to be artificial, as Wilde disrupts the separation between reality and artifice. "Of That Transfigured World" argues for a closer understanding of the hermeneutic and epistemological workings of several major British authors. My dissertation offers a paradigm through which to view these writers that connects them to the on-going Victorian discourses of realism while also pointing to the critical sophistication of their positions in seeking to relate truth to art. My identification of the tensions between what I term topos and chora in these works illuminates the relationship between the creation of meaning and the hermeneutics used to direct the reader to that particular meaning. It further points to the important, yet sometimes troubling, role that imagination plays in the epistemologies at the center of that crowning Victorian achievement, the Realist novel.
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11

Tsank, Stephanie A. "Eating the American dream: food, ethnicity, and assimilation in American literary realism, 1893 - 1918." Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6514.

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This project examines how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers used food imagery and scenes of consumption to characterize immigrants in works of American literary realism. I argue that William Dean Howells’s construction of realism—supported by the publishing industry’s elitism—reinforced existing cultural and class hierarchies by perpetuating divisions between narrator and subject, native and immigrant. Tacitly responding to the ideologies of Howellsian realism, writers Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Weldon Johnson, and Willa Cather used food scenes to promote cultural pluralism, or alternately, to replicate the hierarchal narrative structures underpinning the genre. At the same time, these writers responded to traditional formulations of the relationship between identity and consumption as enforced by a long-standing hierarchy of the senses, women’s domestic reform movements, and the industrialization and corporatization of the food industry at the century’s turn. The chapters of this project examine different facets of realism: naturalism, regionalism, the passing narrative, and the turn toward modernism, respectively. Each chapter also explores different aspects of American culinary history, including debates about the sensory body, the rise of domestic science and early home economics, and the mass production of food—all important developments that shaped the way Americans understood the role of food and eating in their lives. By focusing on the parallel ideological imperatives of consumption and narration within American literary realism, this study provides a more comprehensive view of how power was constituted at the century’s turn based on ideas about how individuals should consume the world around them, and furthermore, how one’s approaches to consumption could be a means of obtaining—or forfeiting—claims to national citizenship.
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12

Young, Jennifer Maria. "Paradidomi : magical realism and the American South." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2009. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/169817/.

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The thesis is comprised of a novel and a critical reflection. The novel component, entitled The Mathers’ Land, draws on traditions of magical realism, storytelling, memory and metafiction. The framing narrative of the novel follows Luanne Richardson, a librarian who has moved South with her new boyfriend, Kenneth Miers. As soon as they arrive in Peebles, North Carolina, Kenneth disappears. Luanne only knows that he last visited a particular house that belongs to the Mathers, the richest family in Peebles. Luanne forces an encounter with the head of the family, Walter Mathers. Despite her initially confrontational contact, Walter Mathers offers Luanne a job to construct a history of his family through interviews and records. He hopes the history will provide an answer to why his only son Eric has not produced an heir. Luanne’s research draws her into a claustrophobic society where no one seems to notice the frequent deaths of the wives of the Mathers family or their odd attachment to roses and a dogwood tree, as elements of magical realism occur in the frame story. The interviews Luanne conducts appear on the pages of the novel as fully developed stories, which draw on themes of tradition, loss and family attachment. These themes are explored through perceptions of memory and storytelling. The critical reflection component considers both what methods and writings made it to the thesis as well as what methods and writings did not. It explores the modes of construction, from the use of Oulipian and metafictional techniques to the use of magical realism. The major influences from specific writers are addressed in terms of structure, magical realism and Southerness, specifically Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Mischa Berlinksi, Sharyn McCrumb, Randall Kenan, Steven Sherrill, and particularly Doris Betts. The reflection concludes by addressing what it means to be an expatriate ‘Southern’ writer.
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13

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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14

Butt, Maggie. "What if- : english fiction and the constraints of realism : a novel, 'Living in the past', and a critical commentary." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.249568.

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15

Gasiorek, Andrew B. P. (Andrew Boguslaw Peter). "A crisis of metanarratives : realism and innovation in the contemporary English novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74280.

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Critics of the English novel, arguing that it is underpinned by liberalism, frequently claim that the crisis of realism disclosed in the work of many contemporary writers derives from a concomitant crisis of liberalism. Liberalism's dissolution is thus seen to prefigure the death of the novel. This dissertation contends that realism cannot be equated with liberalism and that the contemporary crisis of representation signals a broader crisis of metanarratives.
Focussing on selected novels of five post-war English novelists--B. S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, and Angus Wilson--I argue that their different responses to the crisis of representation show that it is not a crisis of liberalism alone. Johnson rejects realism for epistemological reasons; Lessing and Berger question it on political grounds; Murdoch and Wilson combine its strengths with a self-reflexive awareness of its weaknesses. I suggest that Murdoch's and Wilson's novels, which argue that fiction does not reflect reality but endows it with meaning and which are at once representational and metafictional, offer the most fruitful ways of acknowledging the crisis of representation while refusing to be paralyzed by it.
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16

Pooley, Simon Preston. "Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie : three moments in the problematics of magic realism." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18876.

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Chapter One begins by outlining the space magic occupies in Western culture, clarifying what I mean by the term "magic". I examine aspects of indigenous American sacred traditions which have influenced and which prefigure magic realism. I review the development of the aesthetic in its Latin American context, touching on the Chronicles, the role of nationalism and erotic rhetoric, the influence of European modernism and the role of the intellectual in Latin American society. Chapter Two examines the development of a realist aesthetic in Europe since the Enlightenment. This review of its manifestations and counter-traditions in European culture is founded upon a discussion of aspects of the philosophy of Kant. I focus on the influence of Surrealism which is particularly illuminating of Latin American magic realism. The impacts of anthropology and psychoanalysis on Latin American writers are also reviewed. Chapter Two includes a review of formulations of magic realism influential in the field of English studies and concludes with a working definition which is used as a basis for the discussions of the three novels analysed in this study. Chapter Three is a study of the development of Alejo Carpentier's version of magic realism culminating in the writing of The Kingdom of this World in 1949. Through using both European and indigenous American techniques and perspectives he hoped to create a literature which could represent the complex realities of Latin American life and establish a mythology for the founding of a unified Latin American identity.
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17

Garske, Kevin T. "Society and Suffering: City as Character in 19th Century Realism." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1219.

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between the city and the individual in literature, thereby acknowledging the anthropomorphic qualities we endow with our cities and in turn, how these qualities consolidate into the trope of the city character. We build this understanding by discussing the social, moral, political, literary, etc. associations of the city, and how these lend themselves to expressions of human energy or reflections of human character. These understandings are then given form through close readings of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
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18

Youngkin, Molly C. "Men Writing Women: Male Authorship, Narrative Strategies, and Woman's Agency in the Late-Victorian Novel." Connect to this title online, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1037376119.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2002.
Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 322 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-322). Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2006 Sep. 25.
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19

Bundy, Dallin J. "Magical Realism and the Space Between Spaces." DigitalCommons@USU, 2012. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1309.

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Magical realism comes from Franz Roh, a german art historian and critic, who first used the term to describe the Post-Expressionism movement in visual art. His seminal writings and definitions on Post-Expressionism, then known as magical realism, were translated into Spanish and made available to Latin America in the mid twentieth century. Authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez adopted Roh's writings and re-appropriated magical realism into literary art, and from there the new genre proliferated through the Latin American Boom and magical realism in literary fiction reached global recognition, inspiring authors across the world to take it up and continue the tradition into the present.
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20

Holgate, Ben. "Porous borders : the amorphous nature of magical realist fiction in Asia and Australasia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:32abdfeb-baa7-40ee-b721-89b66bc74043.

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This thesis aims to broaden the scope of magical realism by examining contemporary fiction in Asia and Australasia, regions which have been largely neglected in critical discussion of the narrative mode. My research seeks to modify and expand our collective conception of magical realism through key texts that challenge not only how we read the narrative mode, but also our expectations of it. My analysis involves a dual intervention in the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I supplement existing scholarship of magical realism with new paradigms of critical thought, such as epistemology, mythopoeia, ecocriticism, intertextuality and discourse on human rights. Each of the key authors - Indigenous Australian Alexis Wright, New Zealand Maoris Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera, Indian-born cosmopolitans Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, and Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan - subjects the narrative mode to differing intellectual, socio-cultural and historical frameworks, and in the process reinvents magical realism to serve their own artistic purposes. The authors' key texts demonstrate the need to recalibrate theory on magical realism in contexts such as Alexis Wright's depiction of ongoing colonisation of Australia's first inhabitants in a supposedly postcolonial country, and Mo Yan's critique of post-communist China. I argue that magical realism has porous borders, not only geographically and culturally, but also in the sense that the narrative mode frequently spills over into other, different generic kinds such that the distinctions between them are often blurred. In addition, magical realism's constant state of transformation makes it particularly difficult to define. Therefore, I propose a minimalist definition of the narrative mode and a flexible approach. However, underlying cultural elements and individual artistic expression in a text may sometimes limit magical realism's utility as a tool for literary analysis. Finally, I explore the notion of a genealogy of magical realism based on polygenesis, emerging in different cultures at different times.
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Chatfield, Thomas Edward Francis. "Beyond realism and postmordernism : towards a post-Christian morality in the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1db4198a-56e4-417d-b5e5-eb6586a6d7d6.

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This thesis evaluates and re-evaluates the relationship between the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis through a detailed examination of their published works, and attempts to locate this relationship in the context of the central moral uncertainties of post-1945 British fiction. Most previous critical studies of these authors have tended to discuss the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis in terms of an opposition between the father's realism and the son's postmodernism, and have debated Philip Larkin's influence upon Martin Amis only tangentially. Against this trend, this thesis argues that these three authors share a commitment to literature as a public, moral act, and, in particular, that their works share the intention of articulating a number of closely related secular 'human values' which map out a potential post-Christian morality in British society. The thesis also examines a common tension within their oeuvres inimical to such hopes - the fear that the possibilities of rational self-scrutiny and of becoming 'less deceived' have been discredited by the history of the twentieth century, and that this history instead evidences the dominance of irrational and self-destructive tendencies in the human. These fears, it is further claimed, are implicated in the works of all three authors in a tendency towards the construction of Edenic myths, deterministic simplifications, and despairing devaluations of the value of human life. Overall, this thesis makes the case for the significance of the common concerns of Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin's works in the context of contemporary literary studies: their efforts to create in art an unpretentiously 'public space' for the address of burning moral and existential issues, and their unresolved struggles with the question of what it might mean to live a good life in a society which no longer possesses religion as a common moral language.
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Stratman, Gregory J. "The literary language of William Dean Howells in theory and in practice : the evolution of a career /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1996. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9737860.

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23

Mete, Baris. "Reconceptualisation Of Realism In British Postwar Fiction: The Cases Of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark And John Fowles." Phd thesis, METU, 2011. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613417/index.pdf.

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This study is about British postwar fiction and its canonical reception according to a special categorisation of the novelists who were publishing in Britain during the two decades after the end of the Second World War. The study emphasises that mainstream literary criticism of 1950s and &rsquo
60s Britain tended to catalogue the novelists of this period according to a well-established dichotomy between tradition and innovation in which the traditional realist novels, the neorealist works of C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, were privileged over any other fictional work having modernist innovative characteristics. Therefore, the first published novels of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles, novelists belonging to today&rsquo
s postmodern canon, were first critically recognised as social realist works in Britain. One of the objects of this study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of this classification. Moreover, the main argument of the study is that none of these three novelists should have been classified as a traditional realist novelist. All of these three British postwar novelists were reconceptualising traditional realism by self-reflexively including the problem of representation as part of their conventional subject matters in their formal realist novels.
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Molloy, Carla Jane. "The art of popular fiction : gender, authorship and aesthetics in the writing of Ouida : a thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the University of Canterbury /." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Culture, Literature and Society, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/1956.

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This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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Harrison, Dana M. "Realism in Pain: Literary and Social Constructions of Victorian Pain in the Age of Anaesthesia, 1846-1870." Thesis, Temple University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3564812.

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In 1846 and 1847, ether and chloroform were used and celebrated for the first time in Britain and the United States as effective surgical anaesthetics capable of rendering individuals insensible to physical pain. During the same decade, British novels of realism were enjoying increasing cultural authority, dominating readers' attention, and evoking readers' sympathy for numerous social justice issues. This dissertation investigates a previously unanswered question in studies of literature and medicine: how did writers of social realism incorporate realistic descriptions of physical pain, a notoriously difficult sensation to describe, in an era when the very idea of pain's inevitability was challenged by medical developments and when, concurrently, novelists, journalists, and politicians were concerned with humanitarian reforms to recognize traditionally ignored and disadvantaged individuals and groups in pain? By contextualizing the emergence of specific realist novels including works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, William Howard Russell, and Charles Dickens, within larger nonfiction discourses regarding factory reform, prison reform, and war, this dissertation identifies and clarifies how realist authors, who aim to demonstrate general truths about "real life," employed various descriptions of physical pain during this watershed moment in medicine and pain theory, to convince readers of their validity as well as to awaken sympathetic politics among readers.

This study analyzes Gaskell's first industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), Reade's prison-scandal novel, It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), Russell's Crimean War correspondence (1850s) and only novel, The Adventures of Doctor Brady (1868), and Dickens's second Bildungsroman, Great Expectations (1861), thereby revealing different strategies utilized by each author representing pain - ranging from subtle to graphic, collective to individualized, urgent to remembered, and destructive to productive. This study shows how audience expectations, political timing, authorial authority, and medical theory influence and are influenced by realist authors writing pain, as they contribute to a cultural consensus that the pain of others is unacceptable and requires attention. These realist authors must, in the end, provide fictionalized accounts of pain, asking readers to act as witnesses and to use their imaginations, in order to inspire sympathy.

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McLaughlin, Marc. "'Movie-made generation' : cinema-going and the novel in post-war Britain." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:60172f5a-148b-44a4-b24f-6f65ad8c7d1d.

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This thesis examines how the reading and writing of the post-war British novel is altered by the emergence of an 'everyday' cinema-going culture amongst young people in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The thesis demonstrates how viewing and reading practices converge in the twentieth-century and how the resulting modification of the visual literacy of this new, 'movie-made' generation of 'cinesthetic' writers and readers refigures realism in this period. Such cinesthetic realism can be differentiated from the modernist mode of the 'camera-eye' by how it elicits interactive (and often sexist) affects and leads to techniques such as 'indexical characterisation' and a consideration of 'extratextual' narratives. Thus, the thesis argues for the post-war period as one of literary innovation as opposed to the regressive, anti-modern epoch it is still widely labelled. The work encompasses a broad range of novels and novelists: 'Invitations to a Candy-Floss World?' explains how John Braine's 'documentary' fiction engages with cinematic escapism, how Colin MacInnes incorporates cinema-going as an emblem of marginalisation, and how Alan Sillitoe positions cinema as a 'valid' literary influence; 'I Could Have Bitten Her' examines the influence of Philip Larkin's addiction to cinema in his debut novel, John Wain's investigation of the cinesthetic reification of the post-war novelist, and Kingsley Amis' extratextual and (surprisingly) feminist endeavours; 'Passionate Detachment' explores Muriel Spark's employment of cinema to represent a crisis in feminine ipseity, Lynne Reid Banks' use of 'sexist' cinema as a proto-feminist trope (in conjunction with an interview with Banks), and Iris Murdoch's relationship with cinema as 'Plato's Cave', which leads to refigurations of realism and feminist forms of escape. Ultimately, this thesis aims to foreground an underestimated aspect of the transition between the 'late modernist' and the 'contemporary' in British fiction.
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Rosso, Ana. "Female sexuality in French naturalism and realism, and British new woman fiction, 1850-1900." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/14126.

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The Victorian need to compartmentalise and define women’s sexuality in terms of opposing binaries was paralleled by the vague idea that the period’s French and British literatures were at odds with one another. Elucidating the deep connections between, and common concerns shared by, French Naturalist and Realist and British New Woman authors, this thesis shatters the dichotomies that attempted to structure and define women’s sexuality in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. The thesis focusses on novels and short stories by French authors Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and New Woman authors Sarah Grand, Ménie Muriel Dowie and Vernon Lee. In a time during which the feminist movement was gaining momentum, and female sexuality was placed at the heart of a range of discourses, and scrutinised from a number of different angles – not only in literature, but in medicine, psychology, sexology, criminology – the consideration of the female sexual self and her subjectivity brings together the work of authors whose oeuvres have been largely considered as antithetical. Previous work has indeed shown the centrality of female sexuality to both literatures, yet never compared them. This thesis rediscovers the significance of both literatures’ investment in a discourse revolving around female sexuality by contrasting the French male authors with the British female writers, and uncovering unexpected parallels in their claims about the contemporary situation of women. Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe’s feminist philosophy frames the thesis’s comparative analysis, questioning and re-examining these authors’ representations of female sexuality. The ideas of sensuality and rationality, motherhood, reproduction, marriage, and prostitution thus become recurring concerns throughout it. The thesis’s first chapter considers the female as sexual subject and/or object of the male gaze, in a range of New Woman and French literature. The second and third chapters are organised around the themes of marriage and prostitution, and the final chapter considers issues of female sexuality within the fantastic short story.
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Nelson, Katherine Snow. "Influenza, Heritage, and Magical Realism in Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2015. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4416.

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Despite the devastating scope of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, curiously few references to the flu exist in literature. Katherine Anne Porter offered one of modernism's only extensive fictional treatments of the pandemic in her short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” decades after her own near-death encounter with the flu. Porter was able to give voice to an experience that had traumatized others into silence by drawing on an early form of magical realism. Magical realism's ghosts—everyday presences rather than otherworldly beings to be feared—are of particular relevance to “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” since ghosts “haunt” Porter's semi-autobiographical Miranda throughout the story, acting as correctives to Miranda's (and Porter's) desire to isolate herself from the familial and regional heritage that burdens her with unwanted and often conflicting ideologies. Ultimately, in using magical realism to explore her sense of self and to articulate the alienating effects of her near-death experience, Porter is able to embrace her complicated heritage and her fractured past, reclaiming interconnectedness while maintaining her individuality.
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Arnegard, Iver O. "Farland." View abstract, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3353560.

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30

Smith, Jennifer Ann. "Developing pupil understanding of school-subject knowledge : an exploratory study of the role of discourse in whole-class teacher-pupil interaction during English literature lessons." Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2299/21152.

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In this submission I explore the role played by discourse in the development of pupils' understanding of school-subject knowledge in secondary school classrooms in England, following changes to GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) specifications in 2015. Changes to the structure, the subject content, and the assessment of GCSEs were made in an effort to focus on 'powerful knowledge' during the Key Stage (KS) 4 curriculum (for pupils aged 14 - 16 years old) and in order to promote an emphasis on knowledge that is based on academic disciplines. My research looks at the concept of powerful knowledge, based in a critical realist epistemology and a social realist theory of knowledge, and the extent to which all young people are likely to access knowledge that is powerful in the classroom. I argue that access for all pupils to the means by which to judge knowledge claims and thereby challenge and change society - the transformational power of knowledge - underpins a social justice agenda. My research explores a less-developed aspect of the social realist debate on powerful knowledge, a pedagogic discourse to enable a move away from merely teaching factual or content knowledge. I propose that for knowledge to be powerful teachers and pupils need to be 'epistemologically aware'. My case-study research contributes new empirical findings to the literature on pedagogic discourse for a powerful knowledge curriculum. I discuss the learning trajectories of 15 pupils (including five from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds) from two Year 10 'case' classes observed over a 12-week period, during which they studied a novel as part of their GCSE English literature course. 'Thinking notes' and concept mapping were introduced as innovative data-gathering and analytical tools with which to gain a unique and detailed analysis of pupils' learning over the series of lessons given during the 12-week period. I discuss the teachers' conceptual framing of their discipline and the role that this, together with pupils' experiences and backgrounds, has in the re-contextualisation of discipline-based knowledge in the classroom. I conclude that pedagogic discourse that makes the epistemic logic and related concepts of a subject explicit - an epistemological awareness - may enable pupils from both disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds to build systems of meaning that transcend their everyday understanding of the world and the context in which they view it to access powerful knowledge. I present a conceptualisation of a powerful knowledge pedagogic discourse for the study of a novel in the KS4 English literature classroom.
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Thomson, Jennifer. "Gendered Resistance & Reclamation: Approaches to Postcolonialism Modeled by Female Characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/654.

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Motivated by the lack of scholarship surrounding female characters in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, I sought to examine the distinct identities of four female characters. The collapse of dualities and embodiment of hybridity in Ursula, Pilar Ternera, Amaranta, and the Remedios women reveals the hegemonic power structures that are disrupted by these empowered women. The exploration of these women and their relationships to gendered dichotomies points to the potential of their identities in enacting colonial resistance and reclaiming traditional cultural heritage.
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Smith, Gary T. "Shouting Distance." UKnowledge, 2017. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/54.

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Shouting Distance is a collection of ten short stories written by Gary Thomas Smith. Most of the stories take place in Appalachia and rural Kentucky, and the stories set outside of the region still feature characters whose identities are intricately bound to it. The characters' relationships to Appalachia are complex as some embrace the mountains and their culture, while others feel oppressed by that environment. The stories are driven by characters' relationships with family and friends, with their futures and their pasts, or with cultural expectations. The collection explores themes such as poverty, violence, substance abuse, and loss. The natural world is pervasive throughout these stories, and many of them illustrate the effects of human interaction with the environment. While the seeming decline of rural life is at the foreground of this collection, it does not dismiss the beauty of this life. Rather, it suggests that there is promise for the future in spite of loss, hate, and fear.
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Callaghan, Jennefer. "Spectral realism the ghost stories of William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Sarah Orne Jewett /." Restricted access (UM), 2009. http://libraries.maine.edu/gateway/oroauth.asp?file=orono/etheses/37803141.pdf.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Emory University, 2008.
Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 25, 2010) Available through UMI ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-269). Also issued in print.
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Thompson, Angela Myers. "Leaving Her Story: The Path to the Second Marriage in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Middlemarch." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2004. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd593.pdf.

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35

Tillman, Danielle L. "Un-Fairytales: Realism and Black Feminist Rhetoric in the Works of Jessie Fauset." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2010. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/91.

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I am baffled each time someone asks me, “Who is Jessie Fauset?” As I delved into critical work written on Fauset, I found her critics dismissed her work because they read them as bad fairytales that showcase the lives of middle-class Blacks. I respectfully disagree. It is true that her novels concentrate on the Black middle-class; they also focus on the realities of Black women, at a time when they were branching out of their homes and starting careers, not out of financial necessity but arising from their desire for working. They establish the start of what Patricia Hill Collins later coined “Black feminism” through strong female characters that refuse to be defined by society. This thesis seeks to add Jessie Fauset to the canon of Black feminists by using Collins’ theories on Black feminism to analyze Fauset’s first two novels, There Is Confusion and Plum Bun.
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Hester, Hillary Dawn. "Breaking the Bonds of Silence: The Immigrant Experience in Magical Realist Novels of Katherine Vaz and Chitra Divakaruni." [Johnson City, Tenn. : East Tennessee State University], 2003. http://etd-submit.etsu.edu/etd/theses/available/etd-1108103-143649/unrestricted/HesterH120803f.pdf.

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Thesis (M.A.)--East Tennessee State University, 2003.
Title from electronic submission form. ETSU ETD database URN: etd-1108103-143649. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via Internet at the UMI web site.
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Lopes, Leanne. "Realism in Russian literature capturing truth and eliciting responses /." Click here to view, 2010. http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/englsp/2/.

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Thesis (B.A.)--California Polytechnic State University, 2010.
Project advisor: Robert Inchausti. Title from PDF title page; viewed on Mar. 24, 2010. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on microfiche.
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Lewis, Abby N. "How Disassociating the Past Reassociates the Present: Distilling the Magic out of Magic Realism in Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2017. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/421.

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American Indian author Susan Power’s novel The Grass Dancer is often categorized as magical realism, yet Power has stated the novel is a representation of her reality and that it is not a magical realist text. The term magical realism was first applied to the work of Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez whose writing depicts magical events in a matter-of-fact narrative tone. It has since expanded to include other cultures. The question is whether it is a term that can readily be applied to the literary work of all cultures. The closest Wendy B. Faris, one of the most prominent experts on magical realism, comes to discussing the term in relation to the work of American Indian authors is by simply acknowledging Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich’s label as a magical realist author. In order to aid Power in her rejection of the association, I delve into both her Dakota heritage and her life through the lens of biographical criticism in order to obtain a working image of her reality. By locating and examining the seeds of truth in her fiction, I explain the magical qualities of her novel in a rational and logical manner.
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Hoffman, Dustin M. "Living Impaired and Other Stories of the Underemployed." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1245558235.

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40

Cooper, Michael. "Tangerines in a Tomato Patch." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2007. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/24.

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This thesis is comprised of a collection of short stories, most of which are set in southern, urban milieus. The fictional characters contained within deal in their own unique ways with the crises they face. Most of these sources of conflict arise from domestic complications. Six of the eight stories are written in the first person; the collection is voice-driven and concerned with the idiosyncratic points of views of the focal characters, and in this way borrows from the tradition of Southern fiction, which is in many cases laced with dark humor.
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Varnado, Ethan C. "A Wonder Book." VCU Scholars Compass, 2017. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4965.

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This thesis is a collection of nine short stories about real people dealing with unreal problems. In one story, a small-town man answers a knock at his door, only to find three wisemen, who have followed a star and proclaimed him as their new messiah. In another, a reporter travels across the snowy length of Canada looking to interview people who have witnessed the Virgin Mary materialize above Toronto. Deranged Egyptologists, vampires with diseased blood, wacky witches, and unhappy mediums all inhabit tales whose landscapes span the distance between Chattanooga, Tennessee and the afterlife.
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42

He, Wei. "The First Party." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1376047028.

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43

O'Farrell, Kevin. "Joyce after Nietzsche : irony and the will to truth." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3de0686a-b70f-433c-ae20-9de7d554b08e.

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This thesis explores and evaluates the work of James Joyce using the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. It does so not only by examining Joyce's knowledge of Nietzsche's writings, but also through demonstrating how effectively they can illuminate Joyce's themes and techniques, and aid in a general reconceptualisation of his literary project. My analysis draws on several of Nietzsche's key concepts - perspectivism, ressentiment, the will to power - and applies them to Joyce's work. The main idea I use however is the will to truth. I argue that Joyce's primary concern as an artist was the depiction of what he saw as the truth of contemporary existence, in Dublin and more generally. This aim determines his technē, the origin and form of his work of art. Various manifestations of irony, a key element of Joyce's technique, help illustrate the importance of this will to truth. This understanding of his work eliminates the false division between form and content and through an emphasis on Joyce's artistry and philosophy, rather than the historical context in which he wrote (that is, on the author rather than the man), allows for a truly critical assessment. The five chapters that follow my introduction are chronologically ordered. They examine the early works, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially Ulysses, in considerable detail and from various angles. Though careful to respect the individuality of each, my analyses find a common thread of realism uniting the three major works of prose fiction; beginning with the French naturalism of the short stories, moving on to a new development of perspectival irony and a unique mode of allegory in his first novel, and ending in what Joyce called 'the new realism' of his epic. My study then explains how and why realism is problematised in the later chapters of Ulysses as the will to truth comes to question itself. The thesis concludes with an assessment of Finnegans Wake, considering how it marks a radical departure from Joyce's earlier practice, and why I regard it a failure.
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Woo, Chimi. "Cross-Cultural Encounter And The Novel: Nation, Identity, And Genre In Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1204725332.

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45

Richards, James. "Sugar Skulls." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2006. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/8.

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This dissertation is a collection of four long short stories about contemporary Americans written in the mode of psychological realism. “Bare Knuckles” depicts the struggles of a young man trying to “make it” in the world of illegal boxing. “ZOSO” focuses on the breakdown of an upper-middleclass family forced to move from the rustbelt to the “New South.” In “Dusted,” a man ill-equipped to navigate through the adult world turns to substance abuse and violence as a “way out.” “Sugar Skulls” explores the fascination with death in the punk rock world.
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Koras, Demetra. "Primrose and Other Stories." Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2020. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/519.

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47

Troscianko, Emily Tamarisk. "The literary science of the 'Kafkaesque'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:47188ae7-a32b-41e8-b591-303b7d9367de.

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This study provides a precise definition of the term 'Kafkaesque' by enriching literary criticism with scientific theory and practice, including an experiment on readers' responses to Kafka. Dictionary definitions justify taking the term back to its textual origins in Kafka's works, and the works can fruitfully be analysed by investigating how readers engage with them through cognitive processes of imagination. Modern scientific developments posit that vision, imagination, and consciousness should be conceived of not in terms of static pictorialism – reducible to the notion of 'pictures in the head' – but in terms of enaction, i.e. as an ongoing interaction with the external world around us. Most traditional nineteenth-century Realist texts are based on pictorialist assumptions, while Kafka's texts evoke perception non-pictorially and are therefore more cognitively realistic. In his personal writings, Kafka wrestles with problems entailed by pictorialist conceptions of vision, imagination, and the function of language, and comes to enactivist solutions: evocation of perception that does not result in painting static tableaux with words. In his fictional works, Kafka correspondingly evolves a cognitively realistic way of writing to evoke fictional worlds that directly engage the cognitive processes of their readers; Der Proceß is a prime example of the 'Kafkaesque' text and reading experience, defined by being compelling yet simultaneously unsettling. Modulations in narrative perspective and evocation of emotion as enactive also contribute to the experience of the 'Kafkaesque' as compelling; yet Kafka's texts simultaneously unsettle by preventing straightforward emotional identification with the protagonists, and destabilising deep-rooted concepts of selfhood as singular and unified. The theoretical discussion of the 'Kafkaesque' experience as compelling yet unsettling is complemented and refined by an experiment testing readers' responses to a short story by Kafka. The term 'Kafkaesque realism' denotes Kafka's compelling yet unsettling non-pictorial evocation of perception of the fictional world. Kafkaesque realism falls into the broader category of 'cognitive realism', which provides a framework for analysing fictional texts more generally.
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Zahoor, Abubaker. "Desires & Debacles." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1607264387584207.

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49

Vermeiren, Koenraad. "Under the influence sympathetic narration in the nineteenth-century English realist novel /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2009. 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:3380146.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4692. Adviser: Andrew Miller.
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50

Sexton, Melanie. "The woman's voice: The post-realist fiction of Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6822.

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Since Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro do not frequently employ experimental or overtly metafictional forms, they are often read as realist writers in contradistinction to postmodernists. In fact, the assumptions upon which their work rests have little in common with the assumptions underlying realism, and they are as resoundingly post-realist as their postmodern counterparts. One of the key characteristics of realism is an assumption that language can be a neutral, transparent medium in which life can be rendered without distortion. Yet in the work of Atwood, Munro, and Gallant language is never transparent. Language creates reality, and this creation is always connected to power. The three writers share anxieties about the paradoxical nature of women's relationship to language: women must use language in order to assert their existence in the world, yet language exerts disturbing control, especially over women. This control is insistently depicted as a form of violence. Realism, to use Bakhtin's terms, is essentially monologic--its narrative strategy depends on a single unifying view, which the reader is encouraged to share. These writers, by contrast, parody the monologic view offered by society's master narratives--often depicted as largely male discourses--and expose it as absurdly limited. They explore the heteroglossia of the contemporary world and insistently expose the ways in which discourses exert power, especially over women. Many of their texts are mis-read as closed realist texts when in fact they remain unresolved and dialogic. Realism encourages a view of character as coherent and unitary, capable of undergoing development and reaching maturity. These writers depict the female self as lacking coherence. Often the boundaries between self and others, especially other women, are confused. Emphasis is placed on the importance of how the self is constructed in the eyes of others rather than on any sense of internal development. For these writers the female self is not a stable entity but a construction. Atwood, Gallant, and Munro do not construct fictions that attempt to mirror life--they recognize the power of voice to construct the world. They are therefore not the naive or conservative "realists" they are sometimes read as. In fact, their work, like that of the postmodernists, challenges and deconstructs the assumptions of realism. However, whereas language for the postmodernists has become little more than a play of empty signifiers, for these women writers it is still vitally allied to power.
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