Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Plantation life in literature'

In nineteenth-century plantation literature, the runaway slave in the swamp was a recurrent "bogeyman" whose presence challenged myths of the plantation system. By escaping to the swamps, the runaway, or "maroon," gained an invisibility that was more threatening to the institution than open conflict. The chattel system was dependent upon an exercise of will upon the body of the enslaved, but slaves who asserted control over their bodies, by removing them to the swamps, claimed definition over the Self. In part, the proslavery plantation novel served to transform that image of the maroon from its untouchable, abstract state to a form that could be possessed, understood, and controlled. In other words, writers defending slavery would often conjure forth the rebellious image in order to dispel it safely.;This project contextualizes some of the major works in the plantation genre by revealing the dialectical processes involved in their creation. For example, one section gives special attention to the cultural milieu of the 1850s surrounding Harriet Beecher Stowe's second anti-slavery novels, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Other primary works include Thomas Nelson Page's "No Haid Pawn" and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, arguably the first novel of the plantation genre. Contexts for these works are comprised of other "literary" works such as plantation romances and slave narratives. But the project also seeks to understand the signifying power of the maroon through the testimonies of former slaves, newspaper representations of African Americans, plantation rituals and daily interactions between black and white, and folklore of former slaves as it was collected (and conceived) by postbellum whites.;Despite the common occurrence of pillory scenes at the conclusion of maroon tales, this project shows that the final signifying power of the maroon was not of the law writ large upon his body; rather, the maroon survived as legend, as an invisible presence just beyond white control.

"The Enchanted Plantation: Literature, Speculation, and the Credit Economy in Virginia, 1688-1754" examines the beginnings of a regionally-based literary culture in colonial Virginia and focuses specifically on texts that either originate from, or have close ties to, the colony's political and administrative capital at Williamsburg. The dissertation argues that literary practices and literary production in Virginia at this time were crucial to the imagination and material construction of Virginia's unevenly-developed plantation landscape, specifically as this plantation landscape arose within the new speculative and financial markets of the early eighteenth century. Individual chapters demonstrate how reading, writing, and publishing--practices that enabled, and were enabled by, a transatlantic empire built upon speculation and credit--were increasingly tied to land speculation and a managerial ethos of plantation administration. While surveying and bringing to light the many genres and writers associated with Virginia and its capital during this period (including financial literature by government officials, public oratory and ballads in Williamsburg, quitrent poetry, the periodical culture of the Virginia Gazette, and William Byrd II's historical narratives), the dissertation analyzes how Virginia's early literary culture assisted in both creating and managing the Virginia plantation as a slave society, a colonial contact zone, and a scene of financial investment.

“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a driving force of southern literature even after the physical plantations begin to fade. In this project, I examine how literary portrayals of plantations flourish in the 1920s and 30s, from the writings of the Nashville Agrarians to the popularity of Gone with the Wind, arguing that this period represents a literary re-mythologizing of the plantation’s legacy as a benevolent and positive model for the south. A significant contribution of this dissertation is then in demonstrating how plantations are present in works that are not traditionally understood as plantation fiction, and that these works offer a resistance to this re-mythologizing through turning to the gothic: the transatlantic plantation gothic in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark, the impact of environmental labor on the plantation gothic in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, and finally, how plantation modernity affects portrayals of natural disasters in plantation territories in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Ultimately, this project contributes to the discussion of plantation modernity currently occurring in Southern Studies beyond the nineteenth century and into the modernist period, while also demonstrating how movements often construed as disparate in American literary studies, like the Harlem Renaissance and the Nashville Agrarians, were actually in close conversation.

In "Trouble in Paradise: Rupture of the Pastoral Plantation Myth in American Literature, 1832-1921," I argue that nineteenth-century African American and white writers use the plantation space in their texts as a barometer of American politics and life. Beginning with a case study of John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832 revised 1851), "Trouble in Paradise" argues that the plantation is fraught with contradiction, conflict, and decay, but it also accommodates other views that are not visible from the big house windows. Therefore, I use Plantation Geography, a spatially-driven model, to reveal the sociopolitical costs of slavery through a comparative analysis of what Patricia Yeager calls "themed spaces." In this framework, the big house acts as a hub that may regulate the widening places--forest, coffeehouse, tavern--which were nonetheless imagined to radiate from it. Feeling the normative pull of the big house, these far-flung places decenter the master's home as the plantation's symbol of power and stability, and locates alternative pathways and their accompanying activities as primary locales of antebellum life. Therefore, while Kennedy intended to preserve the whimsical charm of country life in the Old Dominion, he more publicly remapped the plantation space as national attitudes shifted. By focusing on a variety of plantation spaces--cabins, kitchens, sheds, and stables--and the routes between them, "Trouble in Paradise" challenges the limits of African American democratic participation suggesting that their activities transform and exceed plantation boundaries. Writers throughout this period take a cue from Kennedy's novel by revising the plantation space in vastly different ways. Chapter One, "A House Divided: The Abolitionist Deployment of the Plantation Landscape, 1850-1862," looks at how Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave (1853) utilize the plantation as a means of abolitionist protest. Specifically, this chapter discusses the ways in which Uncle Tom and Madison Washington expose, challenge and transform their positions through their activities in a myriad of spaces including alternative sites beyond the plantation. Therefore, distant places in both novels have a proclivity to either promise or peril; while the cotton gin-house shed, tavern, Quaker home, and ship are potential sites where a slave's minority status could be reaffirmed, their distance from the plantation proper decreases the big house's power and pull. However, as much as these spaces present real opportunities for change, their transitory nature constantly challenged the assurance of a former slave's subjectivity. As promising as these spaces are, the real challenge was to renegotiate the United States as a nation that would eventually support the incorporation of African Americans into its body politic as American citizens. Chapter Two, "Paradise Lost: The State of the Myth during the Civil War and Reconstruction," explores two distinct literary visions of the South as their protagonists' struggle to reconcile themselves to the demise of their plantations during and after the Civil War. Joseph Addison Turner's The Old Plantation: A Poem (1862) reveals a perspective of the plantation through the son of a slaveholder, who tinges southern nostalgia with melancholy, pathos, loss, and decay. However, the poem reveals the limits of his vision because the plantation cannot be replicated and maintained on a national scale. Although Turner's Reconstruction writings reveal an angry and bitter southerner who criminalizes African American movement and pathways, his works also reveal the hope of a new South as a Phoenix, primed to rise from the plantation ashes. Harper's novella counters Turner's lament by chronicling the journey of a man and woman who discover their African-American ancestry. This revelation holds the big house and the White House accountable to the slave cabins of the South and suggests that a radical restructuring of spaces is vital to the South's rebirth. This in effect reveals the conflict between the crippling power of the pastoral plantation in the hearts and minds of white southerners and the courageous endeavors of the emerging African American community as they all participated in the reorganization of the South. Chapter Three, "The `Good Ole Days': Reconciliationist Literature and its Discontents" argues that Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880) and Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Woman (1899) utilize the pastoral plantation in sharp contrast to their antebellum counterparts. While the harmonious spaces of the plantation and Uncle Remus's cabin serve as a framework for the predatory world of the animals in the folktales, these spaces also foster amnesia about the brutality of black bondage and the Civil War by focusing on the good ole days of slavery. Episodes of hostility, violence, toil, and sacrifice by blacks are encrypted exclusively as a series of folktales told by Uncle Remus to the little white boy within the confines of his old slave cabin. However, Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman presents a vision of the plantation as a site of business created to extract wealth from slave labor and the land. Published in The Atlantic Monthly as early as 1887, these stories reveal local and national connections to the plantation through John and Annie's relocation to North Carolina from northern Ohio. At the heart of these tales are Julius's unpleasant memories of an Old South rife with thievery, conjuring, and murder as he seeks to renegotiate his claim to the McAdoo plantation with John and Annie. Both writers reveal a complicated recollection of the pastoral plantation that the earlier Kennedy could not imagine. Concluding with Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902), "Trouble in Paradise" continues to explore the pastoral myth's inconsistencies, appeal and contradictions incepted by John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. In the opening scene of Dunbar's novel, a slave cottage much like the one in Kennedy's novel is resurrected and misery once again intrudes upon Eden. In a dark rebuttal, Dunbar challenges Harris's positive conclusion and suggests that everyone eventually bears the costs of the plantation, including whites. Furthermore, while several scholars argue that Dunbar's ending does not offer social or political alternatives to the plantation model, The Sport of the Gods revisits a space--the urban milieu--as a site where African Americans continue the process of creating a new identity away from the plantation proper. In doing so, this project presents a comprehensive paradigm that enlarges the plantation's boundaries and a narrow definition of "the South."

Lo scopo del presente lavoro è quello di analizzare le fonti storiche e letterarie che hanno sviluppato la sensibilità di G.M.Trevelyan per la conservazione di una natura incontaminata. Tale condizione ha permesso al paesaggio di rappresentare in maniera univoca i valori spirituali della nazione inglese.

Drawing on the tradition of the personal essay, I’m going to try to explore and define my relationship to David Foster Wallace’s writing, how it affected me through the years, changing my perspective on life and changing the story I tell myself about my own life and my place in the world. This is by no means anything new. Personal essays have been around as long as American literature has been and examples of the use of such form for literary discussion can be found among contemporary writers — e.g. Wallace’s own essays on John Updike and Kafka (just to name a couple); Franzen’s Mr. Difficult on William Gaddis; Zadie Smith’s piece on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Choosing to adhere to this tradition has to do with a certain level of agreement with the idea – expressed by Michel de Montaigne – that “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” Or, more broadly but also to the point, the choice of form is an ethical choice. This essay is going to be on myself (and my surroundings) and DFW only because these are what I can be most verbal about, the choice does not imply an avowal of some kind of superior importance attributed by myself to myself and the writer I’m most connected to. In my head we’re just examples in a personal discussion which is bound to touch larger themes than Wallace’s writing, stuff like how one relates to literature and how is a life affected when someone gives books ethical authority, or how literature can affect the individual’s relationship to the community. Literary criticism is constantly striving towards objectivity through scientific approaches, an end that might well be honorable, but that – to me, at least – ends up sounding fake and boring and meaningless a lot of the time. Not to deny that there is self-evident stuff to be found in literature, it’s just that purely analytical approaches – if nothing else – lack certain qualities, qualities that, if less scientific, have a lot to do with literature. The personal essay provides a friendly tone and a conversational approach which I think should be granted more prominence in literary criticism. The form can cure some of the defects and paradoxes currently afflicting the critical practice, its potential has to do with constructing meaning through a dialogic discussion, a principle very dear to Wallace himself. This is what I will be exploring.

Australian hardwood plantations cover more than 1 million hectare, which is almost half of the total national plantations area. Hardwood plantations are commonly slow to mature, with a long rotation time potentially reaching 35 years. Pruning and thinning processes are required during the early stage of the plantation to produce high-quality logs for commercial purpose. Approximately, 50% of the trees are typically cut from the third year during the first thinning, with further 30% removed during the second thinning (10 to 15 years). It is estimated that more than 2 million cubic metres of logs are generated annually during the plantation mid-rotation thinning operation in Australia. However, these logs are considered as low commercial value product because of high defect ratio and poor mechanical quality. In order to ensure the continued expansion of the Australian hardwood plantation sector, higher value products need to be developed to maximise the utility of the available resources and to reduce wastage. The use of the low commercial value thinned logs may offer an opportunity to improve the environmental and economic performance of the hardwood forestry sector. Therefore, this study focused on the potential utilisation pathways for logs produced during the second thinning operation. The study used the case of South-east Queensland to demonstrate the framework, and it was conducted following the standardised methods for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) (ISO14040:2006) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) (AS/NZ4536:1999 R2014). To provide an equitable comparison among the different alternatives assessed in this study, the functional unit was defined as the treatment of 1 Mg of green timber logs from the second thinning at the plantation floor. Both the LCA and LCC analysis were conducted based on a 60-year timeframe. The OpenLCA 1.4.1 and SimaPro v.8.0.4.30 software were used in the simulation. Primary data were used whenever possible to calculate the life cycle inventory. Eco-invent 3.3 and AusLCI databases were used to model the background processes and in cases when the primary data were missing. The lifecycle impact assessment was processed followed the best practice guide for conducting LCA studies in Australia and included five different environmental impact categories: Global Warming (GWP); Eutrophication (EP); Acidification (AP); Fossil depletion (FDP) and Human Toxicity (HTP). Excel spreadsheet was used to conduct the LCC analysis and calculate the present value of the future costs. A constrained stepwise, multi-objective linear programming (LP) model was then constructed to identify the optimal solution for the plantation thinned logs utilisation. The LP problem was solved using LINDO software package over a 60-year period. The time intervals used was ten years. The constraints of the model were classified into three groups: the total feedstocks availability; final product requirements; and environmental and economic targets. A number of pathways may be followed to valorise the thinning logs including the production of engineered wood; solid fuel and biomass to liquid fuels (BTL). This study examined several products under each utilisation pathway in an attempt to identify the optimal combination to maximise the environmental and economic benefits from a lifecycle perspective. Under the engineered wood options, two possible utilisations were assessed: (1) veneer based composite (VBC) utility poles and (2) structural building frame using laminated veneer lumber (LVL). The LCA results indicated that engineered wood products manufactured from the second thinning could offer tangible environmental benefits compared to the conventional construction materials such as concrete and steel. The study highlighted that resin consumptions during engineered wood manufacturing, and use of preventatives for wood treatment were the major contributors to the environmental impacts of engineered wood. Furthermore, for the end of life treatment, incineration with energy recovery rather than landfilling was identified as the most favourable waste management option to reduce the environmental impacts. Additionally, using LVL in multi-level building structural frame presents greater environmental benefits than the VBC utility poles case. The longer durability and higher material efficiency of the LVL option compared to the VBC option contributed significantly to the better environmental performance. Under the energy utilisation pathway, six options were assessed: woodchip gasification in combined heat and power plant (WCG); wood pellets gasification in a combined heat and power plant (WPG); wood pellet combustion for domestic water and space heating (WPC); pyrolysis for power generation (PyEl); pyrolysis with bio-oil upgrading to transportation fuels (PyLT) and ethanol production for transportation fuel mix (EthP). All the bioenergy conversion options had noticeable environmental benefits, particularly on the GWP impact. The WCG option was identified as the best performer followed by the WPG and then WPC. The carbon offsets due to the displaced fossil fuel from electricity and heat generation were the main reason for lowering the GWP impact of these options. Although wood pellets have higher energy density than woodchips, they required additional manufacturing processes, extra energy consumption and additional transportation leading to higher environmental impacts which could not be offset by the improved energy density. The study highlighted that use of the biomass as solid fuel with the least processing requirement had higher environmental benefits than BTL options. Lastly, the environmental benefits gained are dependent on the energy being displaced by the final product. From a life-cycle cost perspective, the results showed that per functional unit, utilising thinned logs to produce engineered wood products was more likely to result in higher LCC than energy production. Overall, the VBC utility pole option had the highest LCC followed by the LVL building frame option. The shorter lifespan and lower material efficiency of the VBC compared to LVL option was a significant contributor to the higher LCC of the VBC option. In regard to the energy conversion, the WCG had the least LCC per functional unit among all options, followed by the EthP and PyEl options. However, it is important to note the shortcoming of the functional unit considered here was based on input (treatment of 1 Mg of thinned logs). To overcome this limitation, the output should be considered. For the energy pathway, the levelised cost per megajoule energy was calculated, which showed that the WCG had the best performance followed by the WPG and then WPC. This is in line with the LCA results. Nevertheless, the energy output does not offer a valid comparison for the engineered wood pathway. Therefore, the costs of the displaced products by the output were considered, in line with the LCA analysis, to provide a more equitable comparison. The concept of ‘substituted values’ (SV) was then introduced in this study to overcome this limitation. The ‘SV’ borrows the concept of ‘displaced emissions’ from the LCA. The SV was calculated as the difference between the LCC of the final product (alternative) and the displaced (substituted) product. When the substituted materials were considered, the engineered wood products presented the highest economic savings while the energy options continued to pose a cost. Nonetheless, the WCG option continued to have the best economic performance among the energy options. The LCA and LCC analysis showed conflicting results regarding the best option to follow in order to maximise the economic and environmental utility of the plantation thinning. Based on equal weighting of the economic and environmental objectives, the multi-objective optimisation (MOO) program solution indicated that the LVL and WCG were the dominating options. However, the percentage allocated to each option varied in different periods. For the first 30 years, the solution favoured energy production with 85% allocation to the WCG in the first 10 years period. Nevertheless, the percentage allocated to energy production declined progressively over the subsequent periods. The LVL option became more dominant starting from the 30th year of the simulation. The share allocated to the LVL option reached 100% of the biomass during the last 10 years period. However, when the environmental weight exceeded 70%, energy production (particularly the WCG option) became the dominant solution while the LVL option became less favourable with only 2% allocation of the biomass. On the other hand, the VBC option did not feature in the solution until the weight assigned to the economic objective exceeded 80%. This research study is relevant nationally and internationally as it presents a novel method to integrate LCA with LCC analysis in a multi-objective optimisation framework to identify the optimal utilisation of forestry products including multiple utilisation pathways. This study also presents a novel method to simplify the complex optimisation problem by converting the MOO question to a single objective optimisation (SOO) problem. The framework introduced three novelties: (a) introduce normalisation factors for better representation of the Australian situation; (b) incorporate the potential economic credits from alternative substitutions into the LCC; this is in line with the accepted accounting methods of LCA to allow credits for offset emissions, and (c) formulate and solve the problem as a stepwise constraint LP to avoid over/under allocation issues resulting from averaging over the timescale. Although the study focused on the South-east Queensland case, the developed method can also be applied in different industry sectors and locations. The outcomes of this research have major implications on Australian forestry sector, particularly on hardwood plantation management. The developed optimisation management strategy can enhance the current economic profitability of the forestry sector by developing new markets for the low value thinned logs from timber plantation while increasing the utilisation rate of wood waste hence to satisfy the global rising timber demand and accumulating global carbon. The results of the study are also relevant to other timber residues and low-grade products from the softwood and pulp-wood plantations. In addition, results of this study can be potentially used by decision-makers to make informed choices to lower the environmental impacts and lifecycle cost of utility infrastructures systems and buildings. Furthermore, this study has implications for the bio-energy generation sector. This study confirms the feasibility of using forestry residue as feedstock to substitute fossil fuel energy while mitigating negative environmental impacts and achieving sustainable development strategy. Globally, this study is a small yet significant contribution towards the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically under the Affordable and Clean Energy; Climate Action and Responsible Consumption and Production.<br>Thesis (PhD Doctorate)<br>Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)<br>School of Eng & Built Enviroment<br>Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology<br>Full Text

Dans les écosystèmes tropicaux de plantation à croissance rapide, la matière organique du sol (MOS) joue un rôle essentiel pour le maintien de la fertilité et la durabilité de la production. L'objectif principal de cette étude était de comprendre et de modéliser la dynamique de décomposition de la MOS sous plantation industrielle d'Eucalyptus, en relation avec les facteurs du milieu et les pratiques sylvicoles. L'utilisation couplée de traceurs isotopiques (13C en abondance naturelle dans une transition savane/eucalyptus et 15N en enrichissement) et de fractionnement granulométrique a permis de suivre le devenir d'intrants minéraux sous forme d'engrais marqué et organiques sous forme de chute de litière et de résidus d'exploitation. Des expériences de décomposition de litière enrichie en 15N, mises au point sur des hêtraies en milieu tempéré et reproduites au Congo, ont servi à l'élaboration et la calibration d'un modèle d'évolution continue du carbone et de l'azote dans la MOS.

This study traces literary representations of race-mixing in the Americas as informed by the paradigms of the true Plantation, the nostalgic Plantation, and the post-Plantation, especially through the figure of the black and mixed-race female domestic servant and the potential for darkening she continues to embody. A comparison of US texts with their contemporary counterparts in Latin America focuses on differing ideologies of race-mixing that resulted in divergent representations of black and mixed-race women by Plantation writers, especially in regard to their sexuality. The works analyzed here include: the nineteenth-century abolitionist novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés, and Bernardo Guimarães’s A Escrava Isaura; the interwar works Las memorias de Mamá Blanca by Teresa de la Parra and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind; and turn-of-the-century novels Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Mario Vargas Llosa’s Elogio de la madrastra and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. The representations of black and mixed-race female servants reveal an erasure of race-mixing in US literature that results in the figure’s relegation to a sexless mammy type. Alternatively, Latin America’s relative embrace of mixing results in a different fate for the servant; though granted greater agency and complexity in the literature, she is ascribed an aggressive or hyperactive sexuality that exposes more nuanced regional anxieties about race-mixing and the female body. This study argues that these differences originate in a foundational religious belief in the US’s unique spiritual project, which has worked to exclude the female subaltern from the national identity. Ultimately, this taboo mindset surrounding race-mixing manifests in US post-Plantation literature in an eradication of normative black sexuality unparalleled in contemporary Latin American texts, and condemns its female servant characters to a dehumanizing fate: unwanted, ignored, silenced, unpersoned.

This is a study of the collective identities of Japanese American elderly in a former sugar plantation community in the rural town of Puna, Hawai'i. Investigating their plantation stories in which they remember, evaluate, and represent their past lives on the plantation from the 1920s, to the 1980s, I explore a process of which they collectively delineate their identities in terms of ethnicity, class, generation, and gender. My analysis focuses on the contents as well as the contexts of plantation stories that include their social and cultural circumstances now and then, transitions in the socioeconomic environment in Hawai'i, and historical events that they have gone through. The purpose of this study is to produce an ethnography of remembering that captures ethnographic voice-cultural testimony in which the Japanese American elderly narrate their plantation experience as both an internally-oriented emotional manifestation and an externally-based common understanding of their community. I demonstrate how the Japanese American elderly employ their memories to reconstruct plantation experience and define their peoplehood as the collective identities of plantation-raised Japanese Americans.

This teacher research study gave me an opportunity to examine how my sixth grade classroom learning environment changed over time to support students' responses to literature across sign systems, and to develop collaboration among adults and students. Specifically, it looked at the ways in which students made mathematical connections in informal discussions as part of class read aloud experiences and how they used mathematics to communicate responses to literature. Over the course of a year I gathered data primarily by audio taping as I read to the class and the following total class discussions. I video taped presentations of literature groups. These literature groups responded to the read alouds using multiple sign systems which reflected and further developed their understandings of the texts. I also kept a reflective teaching journal and field notes throughout the year. The data analyses included a description of the classroom over the year, a re-creation of journal entries between me and collaborative others involved in the Holocaust study, and a qualitative analysis of the mathematics talk, "math talk," generated in the classroom. Math talk was present in my talk and the students' talk as well. The students' math talk showed that mathematics is used as students respond to literature in informal read aloud discussions and subsequent literature presentations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008.<br>Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 23, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-284).

This thesis argues that H.D.'s creativity originates in a flight from reality. Hilda Doolittle's adoption of her initials is interpreted as a sign of the writer's rejection of any identity located in the shared reality of the historical and the quotidian. From childhood her personality presented itself to her as a duality; detaching herself from the merely visible and material world, H. D. created an intense inner life which asserted itself in the dimension of artistic realization. It is argued that paradoxically the unevenness and discontinuity that characterize H.D.'s work derive from the same roots as her artistic originality and power: in her "split dual personality" which posited reality in the disembodied self. H.D. discovered in ancient Greece a metaphor and a direction for her own inner world. However her Imagist poems are not imitative but genuinely original: H.D. invented a new reality which she projected as a world devoid of all traces of human presence. H.D.'s subsequent shift of interest towards autobiographical prose is interpreted as a response to the threatened disintegration of her identity after World War I. The formlessness and repetition of much of H.D.'s prose is thus attributed to the exacerbation of the writer’s dichotomy of being. However, in some of her prose works H.D. succeeded in transfiguring the autobiographical material through the reinvention of reality in the image of her own subjectivity. Seeking new forms for her projection of the self, H.D. turned increasingly towards the occult which she understood as the science of the invisible dimension. She conflated with the occult her discoveries of the cinema as self-projection, and psychoanalysis as an instrument of knowledge of the inner being. It is argued that these interests exacerbated the solipsism inherent in H.D.'s rejection of external reality. With the exception of the war <b>Trilogy</b>, H.D.'s work becomes locked in private meanings which render it increasingly inaccessible to the reader. It is argued that after her mental breakdown in 1946, H.D. never recovered her vitality and originality as an artist. The space that this thesis devotes to the life of H.D. does not intend to justify her work by her life, but to signify that the literary message cannot be isolated from the circumstances in which the process of creation takes place. Thus H.D.'s flight from reality is not judged from an existential point of view as a diminution of being, since it is out of her "split dual personality" that H.D. emerges as a genuinely creative and original artist.

This dissertation focuses on an emperor-poet, Xiao Gang (503-551, r. 550-551), who lived during a period called the Six Dynasties in China. He was born a prince during the Liang Dynasty, became Crown Prince upon his older brother's death, and eventually succeeded to the crown after the Liang court had come under the control of a rebel. He was murdered by the rebel before long and was posthumously given the title of "Emperor of Jianwen" by his younger brother Xiao Yi (508-554). Xiao's writing of amorous poetry was blamed for the fall of the Liang Dynasty by Confucian scholars, and adverse criticism of his so-called "decadent" Palace Style Poetry has continued for centuries. By analyzing Xiao Gang within his own historical context, I am able to develop a more refined analysis of Xiao, who was a poet, a filial son, a caring brother, a sympathetic governor, and a literatus with broad and profound learning in history, religion and various literary genres. Fewer than half of Xiao's extant poems can be characterized as "erotic" or "flowery". Through an analysis utilizing the concepts of genre and intertextuality, I discover that his yuefu titles cover a wide range of old and new topics. This reveals his efforts to revive traditional yuefu writing and to reassert the centrality of the south in Chinese civilization during the Period of Division. This dissertation analyzes Xiao Gang's writing techniques from a philological perspective. With this methodology, I have been able to clarify some misinterpretations by earlier scholars and provide new evidence about Xiao's unique writing skills and creative originality. Rediscovering Xiao Gang is not just a matter of understanding an individual poet from a long past age. The Six Dynasties period during which he lived was politically chaotic and unstable, but it was also a period when literature flourished. Xiao Gang and his literary works provide valuable resources for studying this fascinating era. The re-evaluation of Xiao Gang undertaken in this dissertation comprises an effort to discover the truth that has been hitherto obscured by undue attention to the checkered political history of the Liang Dynasty.

<p> <i>The Life and Times of Donny Duckbuuer</i> is a short-story cycle consisting often short stories. The protagonist, Donny C. Pante, journeys through childhood, military deployment, and the woes of dating and relationships. He is a vehicle that explores the rawness of the male psyche. Through Donny, the reader is not limited to the facade one wears during social interactions, what I refer to as: The Representative. The unfiltered male psyche may be considered perverse and disturbing, better to be left locked away inside one's mind, but to do so is to deny one's own human nature. While most would prefer to not "go there," Donny does.</p>

This project contains the novel 'Life! Death! Prizes!' which was published by Bloomsbury in the UK in April 2012 and in the USA in September 2012. 'Life! Death! Prizes!' was later translated into German as Wir Kommen Schon Klar and published by Berlin Verlag in 2013. The novel was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. The commentary which accompanies the novel explores the starting points for the book, which were my dissatisfaction with my work as a television storyliner on Emmerdale and my discovery of the world of story contained within ‘real life’ magazines such as Chat, Bella, Pick It Up, Love It, Take A Break etc. In the commentary I will explore the narrative strategies used to build an accessible literary novel that borrows from the structure of a ‘real life’ magazine story while observing closely the society we are living in. A novel that explores the nature of the contemporary family and what it is to be a young man trying to build a life in 21st century Britain. In the first chapter I look at how my ostensibly realist and voice-driven novel uses the folk tale Hansel and Gretel and techniques borrowed from ancient Greek drama, as well as exploiting the possibilities and challenges offered by the use of both generic instability and unreliable narration. The second chapter investigates more explicitly the politics of the novel. In this chapter I seek to address how the police, education, local government workers, the law and social services are represented in popular culture and how far these representations are supported, critiqued or challenged by the unreliable narration in 'Life! Death! Prizes!' In both chapters I will assess the current landscape of contemporary fiction and describe where my novel fits within it.

This paper examines the structure, title, epigraph, and spiritual philosophy of Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna Karenina. The intricate structure of the novel can leave more questions than it answers, and as the novel was written at such a critical, complex time of Tolstoy’s life, the ideas the characters struggle with in Anna Karenina are of both daily and cosmic importance. Considering influences and criticism of the novel, the method of Tolstoy’s vision of living well as shown in Anna Karenina leads to a very specific and intricate spiritual philosophy. It is also found that the novel’s structure and title are in conflict.

This investigation focuses on representations of the physical construction and landscape of Southern slave plantations in order to explore the power relationships among inhabitants of those plantations and how those power relationships attempted to function and failed to establish a system of discipline and governance. While every plantation functioned violently in some form, many plantations appear to have attempted to instill a sense of place and permanence of status in slaves with more than just physical violence or obvious and overt forms of mental coercion and abuse. As a supplement to the strategic (and oftentimes random) physical violence inflicted on slaves in the attempts to control their behaviors, owners seem to have also attempted to discipline their slaves through strategic constructions of the plantation landscapes. While concluding that this strategy ultimately failed, this thesis examines attempts by owners to implement particular strategies in regulating and disciplining the behavior of slaves which can be compared with the strategies implemented in a panoptic system as described by Michel Foucault.

In 1824 a young Virginia aristocrat named Richard Thompson Archer migrated to Mississippi. Joining in the boom years of expansion in the Magnolia State in the 1830s, Archer built a vast cotton empire. He and his wife, Ann Barnes, raised a large family at Anchuca, their home plantation in Claiborne County, Mississippi. From there Richard Archer ruled a domain that included more than 500 slaves and 13,000 acres of land. On the eve of the Civil War he was one of the wealthiest men in the South. This work examines the life of Richard Archer from his origins in Amelia County, Virginia, to his death in Mississippi in 1867. It takes as its thesis the theme of Archer's life: his burdens as proprietor of a vast cotton empire and as father figure and provider for a large extended family. This theme weaves together the strands of Archer's life, including his rise to the position of great planter, his duties as husband and father, and his political beliefs and activities. Archer's story is told against the background of the history of Mississippi and of the South, from their antebellum heyday, through the Civil War, and into the early years of Reconstruction. Archer was an aristocrat but also a businessman, a paternalist but also a capitalist. He enjoyed his immense wealth and the power of his position, but he maintained a heavy sense of the responsibilities that accompanied that wealth and power. Archer pursued his business and his family interests with unyielding tenacity. To provide for the well- being and security of his large extended family and of his slaves was his life's mission. Although the Civil War destroyed much of Archer's empire and left him in a much reduced financial state, his family survived the war and Reconstruction with several of their plantations intact and with their social position preserved.

Background: Most of our biomedical knowledge is only accessible through texts. The biomedical literature grows exponentially and PubMed comprises over 18.000.000 literature abstracts. Recently much effort has been put into the creation of biomedical ontologies which capture biomedical facts. The exploitation of ontologies to explore the scientific literature is a new area of research. Motivation: When people search, they have questions in mind. Answering questions in a domain requires the knowledge of the terminology of that domain. Classical search engines do not provide background knowledge for the presentation of search results. Ontology annotated structured databases allow for data-mining. The hypothesis is that ontology annotated literature databases allow for text-mining. The central problem is to associate scientific publications with ontological concepts. This is a prerequisite for ontology-based literature search. The question then is how to answer biomedical questions using ontologies and a literature corpus. Finally the task is to automate bibliometric analyses on an corpus of scientific publications. Approach: Recent joint efforts on automatically extracting information from free text showed that the applied methods are complementary. The idea is to employ the rich terminological and relational information stored in biomedical ontologies to markup biomedical text documents. Based on established semantic links between documents and ontology concepts the goal is to answer biomedical question on a corpus of documents. The entirely annotated literature corpus allows for the first time to automatically generate bibliometric analyses for ontological concepts, authors and institutions. Results: This work includes a novel annotation framework for free texts with ontological concepts. The framework allows to generate recognition patterns rules from the terminological and relational information in an ontology. Maximum entropy models can be trained to distinguish the meaning of ambiguous concept labels. The framework was used to develop a annotation pipeline for PubMed abstracts with 27,863 Gene Ontology concepts. The evaluation of the recognition performance yielded a precision of 79.9% and a recall of 72.7% improving the previously used algorithm by 25,7% f-measure. The evaluation was done on a manually created (by the original authors) curation corpus of 689 PubMed abstracts with 18,356 curations of concepts. Methods to reason over large amounts of documents with ontologies were developed. The ability to answer questions with the online system was shown on a set of biomedical question of the TREC Genomics Track 2006 benchmark. This work includes the first ontology-based, large scale, online available, up-to-date bibliometric analysis for topics in molecular biology represented by GO concepts. The automatic bibliometric analysis is in line with existing, but often out-dated, manual analyses. Outlook: A number of promising continuations starting from this work have been spun off. A freely available online search engine has a growing user community. A spin-off company was funded by the High-Tech Gründerfonds which commercializes the new ontology-based search paradigm. Several off-springs of GoPubMed including GoWeb (general web search), Go3R (search in replacement, reduction, refinement methods for animal experiments), GoGene (search in gene/protein databases) are developed.

Background: Most of our biomedical knowledge is only accessible through texts. The biomedical literature grows exponentially and PubMed comprises over 18.000.000 literature abstracts. Recently much effort has been put into the creation of biomedical ontologies which capture biomedical facts. The exploitation of ontologies to explore the scientific literature is a new area of research. Motivation: When people search, they have questions in mind. Answering questions in a domain requires the knowledge of the terminology of that domain. Classical search engines do not provide background knowledge for the presentation of search results. Ontology annotated structured databases allow for data-mining. The hypothesis is that ontology annotated literature databases allow for text-mining. The central problem is to associate scientific publications with ontological concepts. This is a prerequisite for ontology-based literature search. The question then is how to answer biomedical questions using ontologies and a literature corpus. Finally the task is to automate bibliometric analyses on an corpus of scientific publications. Approach: Recent joint efforts on automatically extracting information from free text showed that the applied methods are complementary. The idea is to employ the rich terminological and relational information stored in biomedical ontologies to markup biomedical text documents. Based on established semantic links between documents and ontology concepts the goal is to answer biomedical question on a corpus of documents. The entirely annotated literature corpus allows for the first time to automatically generate bibliometric analyses for ontological concepts, authors and institutions. Results: This work includes a novel annotation framework for free texts with ontological concepts. The framework allows to generate recognition patterns rules from the terminological and relational information in an ontology. Maximum entropy models can be trained to distinguish the meaning of ambiguous concept labels. The framework was used to develop a annotation pipeline for PubMed abstracts with 27,863 Gene Ontology concepts. The evaluation of the recognition performance yielded a precision of 79.9% and a recall of 72.7% improving the previously used algorithm by 25,7% f-measure. The evaluation was done on a manually created (by the original authors) curation corpus of 689 PubMed abstracts with 18,356 curations of concepts. Methods to reason over large amounts of documents with ontologies were developed. The ability to answer questions with the online system was shown on a set of biomedical question of the TREC Genomics Track 2006 benchmark. This work includes the first ontology-based, large scale, online available, up-to-date bibliometric analysis for topics in molecular biology represented by GO concepts. The automatic bibliometric analysis is in line with existing, but often out-dated, manual analyses. Outlook: A number of promising continuations starting from this work have been spun off. A freely available online search engine has a growing user community. A spin-off company was funded by the High-Tech Gründerfonds which commercializes the new ontology-based search paradigm. Several off-springs of GoPubMed including GoWeb (general web search), Go3R (search in replacement, reduction, refinement methods for animal experiments), GoGene (search in gene/protein databases) are developed.