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Tesi sul tema "Contemporary English fiction"
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1
Oehling, Richard. "Contemporary Irish Fiction: Lavin and Trevor". W&M ScholarWorks, 1985. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625307.
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2
Barker, Anna. "Green fiction : ecocriticism of the contemporary novel". Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2016. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/32673/.
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3
Sacks, Michelle Tamara. "Apocalypse and elegy in contemporary american fiction". Thesis, University of Cape Town, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6724.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
In this dissertation, the use of apocalypse and elegy in contemporary American literature has been explored in an attempt to draw some conclusions about America's complex twenty-first century consciousness. I have selected the millennial novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Blonde), Don DeLillo (Underworld), and Philip Roth (American Pastoral), since all three, written at the century's end, are at once apocalyptic and elegiac in tone, and comprise a useful trilogy tor giving voice to the fracturedness of the American experience. My analysis of the texts traces apocalyptic moments in the novels -- moments of destruction and rebirth, endings, new beginnings, and great revelations -- against some of the most turbulent and often despairing twentieth-century events, in an attempt to show the connection between public and private history. While contemporary apocalypse diners from its biblical origins, the desire for regeneration and renewal persists despite its necessary deferment -- and, even, failure. Yet the apocalyptic impulse persists, and it is this determined future-looking and repeated self-reinvention that I discuss. In terms of the elegy, I argue that the overwhelming sense of loss and mourning that permeates the novels is reflective of a much larger national sense of disillusionment and disappointment at the failure of the American Dream and the dissolution of the America conceived of in the imagination of its first European settlers. While the traditional elegy moves towards consolation, the contemporary elegy often denies the mourner such release from grief. Consequently, in the contemporary novels discussed, consolation is to be found elsewhere. Indeed, I conclude that despite the melancholia of novels that deal so intensely with death, suffering, and tragedy, the act of writing an apocalyptic novel -- of presenting an image of the apocalypse, even if not an apocalypse that gives way to rebirth -- is itself an act of hope, and a call for change.
4
Graham-Bertolini, Alison. "Home of the Brave: Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction". LSU, 2009. http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04142009-191748/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Vigilante literature tells the stories of individuals who rectify injustice by taking matters into their own hands. Examples of this plot can be found in American literature dating from colonial times, when settlers made an effort to preserve their moral code without the aid of an established justice system. The popularity of this theme finds further currency in tales of the frontier and the Wild West, and more recently, Hollywood has capitalized on its popularity by drawing from the myth of American pioneer culture and the theme of the lone avenger. This project identifies an analogous theme in contemporary fiction by women writers, who in the twentieth century began frequently employing female avatars of vigilante justice to challenge (in an illegal or extralegal fashion) those who violate the economic, social, or political rights of women. This dissertation analyzes a collection of novels and short stories by contemporary American women who employ the avatar of the vigilante woman, and demonstrates how female avengers, warriors, bandits, and killers extend and amend the vigilante tradition in the United States.
5
Jayawickrama, Sharanya. "Cross-cultural perspectives in contemporary Sri Lankan fiction in English". Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.615180.
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Alexandru, Maria-Sabina. "Estrangement and return performances in contemporary Indian fiction in English". Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.435063.
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7
Szilágyi, Anikó. "Gabriel the Victorious and Hungarian fiction in contemporary English translation". Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30644/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis employs multiple methodologies in order to explore Hungarian fiction in contemporary English translation as a distinct body of literature. It comprises three interrelated contributions: a bibliography, three case studies, and a translation. A bibliography of English translations of Hungarian novels published between 2000 and 2016 is presented in Appendix A, and Chapter 1 contains an overview of contemporary Hungarian-to-English fiction translation based on the bibliographic data, including a description of the assembly process. Chapters 2-4 focus more closely on a selection of these texts, tracing publication histories as well as target culture reception and interpreting translation shifts. Chapter 2 considers the language of Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai (2013, tr. Ottilie Mulzet) in relation to the author’s vernacular oeuvre, and offers meta-artistic commentary on the target text. Chapter 3 investigates the concept of corporeal writing in Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas (2011, tr. Imre Goldstein), arguing that the organising principle of the source text is compromised in translation, which produces a fragmented work. Chapter 4 uncovers and categorises translation shifts in Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (2002, tr. Len Rix) as an example of a recently translated Hungarian classic. Chapter 5 connects the analytical section of the thesis with the creative component that follows it. It departs from traditional academic discourse and uses a more reflective, lyrical mode of writing to explore the subjectivity of the translator and introduce the new text to its English-language readership. Finally, my English translation of the 1967 Hungarian novel Győzelmes Gábriel by György Méhes is presented under the title Gabriel the Victorious.
8
Cox, Katharine May. "Labyrinths : navigating Daedalus' legacy : the role of labyrinths in selected contemporary fiction". Thesis, University of Hull, 2005. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:5646.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This study initially engages in an historical survey of the varying key realisations of labyrinths and their applications from antiquity through to the beginnings of the twentieth century. The shifting cultural significance of the labyrinth and its deployment in historical documents and literature alike is also evaluated. In particular, it focuses on two distinctive manifestations of the labyrinth: the Egyptian and the Cretan. The examination of these ancient artefacts affords an analysis of the intersection of archaeology, mythology and cultural productions. At the core of this study is the analysis of the fecundity of labyrinths in late twentieth-century fiction, focalised through four salient texts: Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980), Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (1987) and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000). These novels target specific usages of the trope, whereby the physical event of the labyrinth and its navigation, coupled with the labyrinthine text, intensifies an exploration of thematic issues. I will argue that a late twentieth-century engagement with complexity and ideas of selfhood coupled with a propensity for self-reflective narratology recalls the Egyptian and the Cretan labyrinths and so privileges these models. The labyrinth is considered as an appropriate medium to describe narrative construction and consumption in a manner that deconstructs the text as artifice and prioritises the reader's and the author's relationship to it. Specifically, the adoption of the labyrinth addresses the interplay between space and history in the textual arena and so encourages the individual to be envisaged as a transhistorical wandering figure. These textual usages foreground the apposite deployment of the labyrinth as this ancient meta-signifier is an entirely apposite vehicle for the interrogation of the late twentieth-century postmodern condition.
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Moudouma, Moudouma Sydoine. "Intra- and inter-continental migrations and diaspora in contemporary African fiction". Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/80117.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The focus of this dissertation is the examination of the relationship between space and identity in recent narratives of migration, in contemporary African literature. Migrant narratives suggest that there is a correlation between identity formation and the types of boundaries and borders migrants engage with in their various attempts to find new homes away from their old ones. Be it voluntary or involuntary, the process of migrating from a familial place transforms the individual who has to negotiate new social formations; and tensions often accrue from the confrontation between one’s culture and the culture of the receiving society. Return migration to the supposed country of origin is an equally important trajectory dealt with in African migrant literature. The reverse narrative stipulates similar tensions between one’s diasporic culture – the culture of the diasporic space – and the culture of the homeland. Thus, intra- and inter-continental migrations and diaspora is a bifurcated inquiry that examines both outward and return migrations. These movements reveal the ways in which Africans make sense of their Africanity and their place in the world. The concepts of “border”, “boundary” and “borderland” are useful to examine notions of difference and separation both within the nation-state and in relation to transnational, intra-African as well as inter-continental exchanges. I focus more fully on these notions in the texts that examine migrations within Africa, both outward and return movements. This study is not only interested in the physical features of borders, boundaries or borderlands, but also on their consequences for the processes of identity formation and translation, and how they can help to reveal the social and historical characteristics of diasporic formations. What undergirds much of the analysis is the assumption that the negotiation of belonging and space cannot be separated from the crossing or breaching of borders and boundaries; and that these negotiations entail attempts to enter the borderland, which is a zone of exchange, crisscrossing networks, dissolution of notions of singularity and exclusive identities.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die fokus van hierdie proefskrif is ‘n ondersoek na die verhouding tussen ruimte en identiteit in onlangse migrasie-narratiewe in kontemporêre Afrika-literatuur. Migrasienarratiewe dui op ’n korrelasie tussen identiteitsvorming en die soorte skeidings en grense waarmee migrante gemoeid raak in hulle onderskeie pogings om nuwe tuistes weg van die oues te vind. Hetsy willekeurig of gedwonge, die migrasieproses weg van ’n familiale plek verander die individu wat nuwe sosiale formasies moet oorkom, en spanning neem dikwels toe weens die konfrontasie tussen die eie kultuur en dié van die ontvangersamelewing. Migrasie terug na die sogenaamde land van herkoms is net so ’n belangrike onderwerp in Afrika-migrasieliteratuur. Die terugkeernarratief stipuleer dat daar ooreenkomstige spanning heers tussen ’n persoon se diasporiese kultuur – die kultuur van die diaspora-ruimte – en die kultuur van die land van oorsprong. Die ondersoek na intra- en interkontinentale migrasies en diasporas is dus ’n tweeledige proses wat uitwaartse sowel as terugkerende migrasies beskou. Hierdie bewegings openbaar die ware maniere waarop Afrikane sin maak uit hulle Afrikaniteit en hulle plek in die wêreld. Die konsepte van “grens”, “grenslyn” en “grensgebied” is nuttig wanneer die begrippe van verskil en verwydering ondersoek word binne die nasiestaat asook in verhouding tot transnasionale, intra-Afrika en interkontinentale wisseling. Ek fokus meer volledig op hierdie begrippe in die tekste wat ondersoek instel na migrasie binne Afrika, beide uitwaartse en terugkerende bewegings. Hierdie studie gaan nie net oor die fisiese kenmerke van grense, grenslyne en grensgebiede nie, maar bestudeer ook die gevolge daarvan op die prosesse van identiteitsvorming en vertaling, en die manier waarop hulle kan help om die sosiale en historiese eienskappe van diasporiese formasies te openbaar. ’n Groot deel van die analise word ondersteun deur die aanname dat die onderhandeling tussen tuishoort en ruimte nie geskei kan word van die oorsteek of deurbreek van grense en grenslyne nie, en dat hierdie onderhandelinge lei tot pogings om die grensgebied te betree, waar die grensgebied gekenmerk word deur wisseling, kruising van netwerke en die verwording van begrippe soos sonderlingheid en eksklusiewe identiteite.
10
Newns, Lucinda. "At home in the metropole : gender and domesticity in contemporary migration fiction". Thesis, London Metropolitan University, 2014. http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/698/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis looks at a selection of novels by diasporic writers which engage significantly with the domestic sphere and its associated practices in their narratives of migration to Britain from postcolonial spaces. Employing a feminist postcolonial approach to works by Buchi Emecheta, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Leila Aboulela, this thesis challenges dominant readings of migration fiction that have been shaped by postmodern and diasporic frameworks of displacement and rupture, emphasising instead placement, dwelling and (re)rooting as important features of the migratory process. It also aims to re-centre the domestic, private and ‘everyday’ in conceptions of home in current debates about migration, while also generating a productive theorisation of 'home' which synthesises its feminist and postcolonial critiques. My approach is about reading more than the allegorical into literary representations of home-spaces, as I trace the interdependence of public and private, domestic and political, across both form and content in the novels covered. Through my analysis of individual texts, I show how writers draw on the colonial and postcolonial politics of home and domesticity as discursive resources in their narratives of cross-cultural encounter, challenging the devaluation of the private sphere as a static, unproductive and uncreative space. I unpack how these texts engage with the domestic as a material space of inspiration, but also as a political space constructed by histories of colonialism and immigration, as well as by policy and academic scholarship, showing how they respond to and subvert these discourses. Through their engagement with familiar tropes of house and home, many of these works challenge representations of migrant women as passive recipients and reproducers of an externally defined ‘culture’. Instead, I argue, they offer alternative interior geographies which re-map both the British domestic space and that of the home-culture, reframing the home as an important carrier of meaning but one that is constantly in flux, remaking itself according to the needs and desires of those who dwell within its walls.
11
Chan, Wing-chun Julia, e 陳永晉. "Towards an aesthetics of cliché: cultural recycling and contemporary fiction". Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2009. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B42182311.
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Strasen, Christian T. "A Postcard From the Future| Technology, Desire, and Myth in Contemporary Science Fiction". Thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10013970.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis argues that modern, post-apocalyptic science fiction functions as a projected analysis of the author’s contemporary world. This insight is used to chart the historical trajectory of the spread of automaticity, the reduction of objects, and the loss of historical memory. The Introduction introduces readers to both the literary and critical histories of science fiction, contextualizing the worlds that George R. Stewart, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood write in. Chapter One analyzes George R. Stewart’s 1949 novel Earth Abides, using it to demonstrate how the growing trend of automaticity leads toward a reduction of physical objects, and a misunderstanding of politics. Chapter Two uses Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 novel The Lathe of Heaven to reveal an acceleration of automaticity and reduction of objects though the manipulation of human desire. This, in turn, leads to a loss of historical memory via Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive desublimation. Chapter Three charts the effects that the advent of the virtual has had on automaticity and the manipulation of human desire through an engagement with Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake.
13
Rorabaugh, Peter W. "The Sermonic Urge: Postsecular Sermons in Contemporary American Fiction". Digital Archive @ GSU, 2011. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/75.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Contemporary American novels over the last forty years have developed a unique orientation toward religious and spiritual rhetoric that can best be understood within the multidisciplinary concept of the postsecular. In the morally-tinged discourse of their characters, several esteemed American novelists (John Updike, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy) since 1970 have used sermons or sermon-like artifacts to convey postsecular attitudes and motivations. These postsecular sermons express systems of belief that are hybrid, exploratory, and confessional in nature. Through rhetorical analysis of sermons in four contemporary American novels, this dissertation explores the performance of postsecularity in literature and defines the contribution of those tendancies to the field of literary and rhetorical studies.
14
Byatt, Jim. "Taboo and transgression : reconfiguring the monstrous in contemporary British fiction". Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3633/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis considers the remaindered other in contemporary British society, and the representation of that other in British fiction since 1968. The liberal approach to otherness that has arguably been a defining characteristic of the British identity since the Second World War has, I argue, always been incomplete, leaving a remainder to whom equal representation and cultural acceptance have been denied. By examining a diverse range of texts which address an equally diverse range of identities, this thesis addresses the questions of what otherness means in contemporary society, how it manifests and manages itself, and how the fiction of the period addresses the social anomaly. In recent studies of controversial fiction, there has been a tendency to focus either on the aesthetics of excess (eg. Durand and Mandel, 2006), in which the transgression is primarily stylistic, or else on the marginality of the now-legitimised “other” (in particular the homosexual, the racial other, or the working class; eg. Nicola Allen, 2008). In contrast, this thesis examines novels that engage with those figures who have remained socially excluded, figures whose tabooed identity has persisted in spite of the broader move toward liberal inclusivity. The primary texts discussed are, largely, novels that have received little critical attention, despite their literary credibility, highlighting a reluctance to engage with those problematic identities that remain outside the realm of cultural legitimacy. The thesis positions the criminally transgressive (the paedophile, the incestuous family, the sociopath) alongside the culturally stigmatised (the disabled, the elderly and the dying) in an attempt to demonstrate a continuity of resistance to a diverse range of tabooed identities. Theoretically, the argument draws on aspects of cultural studies, structuralism, anthropology and disability studies in order to examine the representation of the tabooed voice and to consider its legitimacy in the contemporary literary field.
15
Steiner, Christina. "Translated people, translated texts : language and migration in some contemporary African fiction". Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8100.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-215)This thesis examines contemporary migration narratives by four African writers living in the diaspora and writing in English: Leila Aboulela and Jamal Mahjoub from the Sudan, now living in Scotland and Spain respectively and Abdulrazak Gurnah and Moyez G. Vassanji from Tanzania now residing in the UK and Canada. Focusing on how language operates in relation to both culture and identity, this study foregrounds the complexities of migration as cultural translation. Cultural translation is a concept which locates itself in postcolonial literary theory as well as translation studies. The manipulation of English in such a way as to signify translated experience is crucial in this regard. The thesis focuses on a particular angle on cultural translation for each writer under discussion: translation of Islam and the strategic use of nostalgia in Leila Aboulela's texts; translation and the production of scholarly knowledge in Jamal Mahjoub's novels; translation and storytelling in Abdulrazak Gurnah's fiction; and finally translation between the individual and old and new communities in Vassanji's work. The conclusion of the thesis brings all four writer's texts into conversation across these angles. What emerges from this discussion across the chapter boundaries is that cultural translation rests on ongoing complex processes of transformation determined by idiosyncratic factors like individual personality as well as social categories like nationality, race, class and gender. The thesis thus contributes to the understanding of migration as a common condition of the postcolonial world as well as offering a detailed look at particular travellers and their unique journeys.
16
Smit, Sarah Johanna. "At home in Fanon: Queer romance and mixed solidarities in contemporary African fiction". Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/23021.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Throughout the recent iterations of student activism that have gripped South African universities, Frantz Fanon has been continuously disinterred. But the figure of Fanon often remains both abstract and plural within its articulations - interpretations of his body of work performing sometimes only partial allegiances to the whole. This means that centralising a Fanon within political discourse stands to reproduce the losses implicated in his mythification, rather than to recover new critical imports in his work. In other words, the simplification of Fanonist rhetoric fails to deal with the "un-political" dimensions of Fanon. As such the more troubling of Fanon's work, namely Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is often left un-interrogated, while The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is read like a manifesto for purposive change. Black Skin, White Masks it seems is deemed "not radical enough" because of what appears to be a problematic preoccupation with 'love and understanding.' In the following intervention, I argue that what makes this centrality of 'love and understanding' so unpalatable to radical activists is a misappropriation of Fanon's formulation of desire. This is in part, I believe, one of the flaws of Fanon setting up the dynamic of racialised desire within cisgender, heteronormative models for potential interracial relationships - "The Woman of Colour and the White Man" and "The Man of Colour and the White Woman." Hence, I consider what queering these relationships does to the way in which we read the political dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks, and whether or not this allays the allegory of revolutionary solidarity of the generic teleology of the heteronormative romance. The object of this thesis is to elucidate what possibilities for political solidarity are generated through the queered dynamic of interracial love, explored in the literature of the contemporary African diaspora. New African writers take seriously what Fanon recognised as "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," by emptying out the category of the nation and engaging with the intersections of a trans-national, trans-gender and trans-racial politics. To demonstrate the ways in which a queer analysis of interracial romance might reimagine a raced identity politics, I analyse novels produced by members of the contemporary African diaspora, whose works deal with mixed race identity. Through my reading of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Yewande Omotoso's Bom Boy (2011), and Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), I hope to demonstrate that contemporary African literature is concerned with the formation of an identity that estranges the category of blackness from itself through its entanglement with a queer identity politics.
17
Williams, Alun Rhys. "Architects of impurity : a study of the political imagination in contemporary fantastic fiction". Thesis, University of Warwick, 2014. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66977/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis investigates the limitations and capacities of genres of the fantastic in their ability to represent the “break” between agency and structure, specifically the transformation of the former into the latter on the scale of radical social and political change. The transformation of utopian impulse to utopian programme is traditionally understood to present a representational impossibility—a “break”—and to require a shift into a less rigorous fantastic or magical representational register. This thesis considers this apparent impossibility to be a product of an ontology of atomised individualism that informs texts from mainstream Hollywood blockbusters to more putatively radical works of literature. It argues that these representations of agency, conceptually limited to individual action, occlude the reality and possibility of communal political agency. This thesis takes contemporary neoliberalism’s transformation of social structures and subjectivities to be driving this specific limiting effect on the ability to imagine alternative patterns of social relations and on the scope and potential of the imagination as such. Beginning with the development of a new political theoretical approach to fantastic literature, this thesis seeks to identify, through a series of close readings, the mechanisms by which this ideological work is performed by sf and fantasy texts, and then seeks to identify alternative representational techniques and strategies that overcome these limitations, allowing the societal imagination to think communal political agency, and move beyond the imaginative confines of the neoliberal horizon. Culminating in the work of China Miéville, this thesis finds that the effort to represent the “break” requires techniques and tropes taken from various genres, in order to capture the becoming—the producing and being-produced—of the world, of social structures, of communities and of subjectivities. The resulting literature has the potential to recruit the reader into occupying a position of radical, critical subjectivity—one which not only understands the malleable, constructed nature of social reality, but understands their own part in its reproduction, and the potential they wield, along with others, to alter it.
18
Adjei, Cassie. "Duality, genre and the "Modern Mulatto" : response and representation in contemporary British fiction". Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/69503/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Within the last few decades much interest has arisen around the growing field of black British and “multi-ethnic” literature, yet the presence of protagonists of mixed origin in these works has been widely overlooked. The aim of this thesis therefore is to explore these characters across a range of genres, using Mixed Race Studies and other critical approaches in order to discover whether contemporary British writing challenges or perpetuates preconceived notions about mixed race subjectivity. Thematically structured, the thesis uses selected texts by authors such as Jackie Kay, Charlotte Williams and Lucinda Roy to investigate how contemporary literature provides a platform for self-expression in the form of the autobiography; explores gender and sexuality; challenges notions of British national identity and national narratives; and (re)considers the problematic concepts of “race” and “belonging”. Furthermore, in the last chapter, the thesis discusses the presence of the mixed race character within picture books for children and young adult fiction. In this section the thesis suggests that such characters can become a strategic tool for the promotion of a culturally diverse nation, whilst also providing young people with coping strategies against racism and introducing the reader to alternative histories. Wishing to employ a comparative and interdisciplinary framework, the thesis draws upon research from a range of different fields, analysing the discourse of “race” and the construction of “mixed race” with the support of writers such as Robert J.C. Young, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Miri Song, Suki Ali, and Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe.
19
Ogston, Linda C. "The clone as Gothic trope in contemporary speculative fiction". Thesis, University of Stirling, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/21487.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
In February 1997, the concept of the clone, previously confined to the pages of fiction, became reality when Dolly the sheep was introduced to the world. The response to this was unprecedented, initiating a discourse on cloning that permeated a range of cultural forms, including literature, film and television. My thesis examines and evaluates this discourse through analysis of contemporary fiction, including Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), Stefan Brijs's The Angel Maker (2008), Duncan Jones's Moon (2009), and BBC America's current television series Orphan Black, which first aired in 2013. Such texts are placed in their cultural and historical setting, drawing comparisons between pre- and post-Dolly texts. The thesis traces the progression of the clone from an inhuman science fiction monster, to more of a tragic "human" creature. The clone has, however, retained its fictional portrayal as "other," be that double, copy or manufactured being, and the thesis argues that the clone is a Gothic trope for our times. The roots of the cloning discourse often lie in Gothic narratives, particularly Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which is analysed as a canonical cloning text. Each chapter focuses on a source of fascination and fear within the cloning discourse: the influence of Gothic paternity on the figure of scientist; the notion of the clone as manufactured product, victim and monster; and the ethical and social implications of cloning. There is a dearth of critical analysis on the contemporary literary clone, with the most comprehensive study to date neither acknowledging the alignment of cloning and the Gothic nor demonstrating the impact of Dolly on fictional portrayals. My thesis addresses this, interweaving fiction, science and culture to present a monster which simultaneously embodies difference and sameness: a new monster for the twenty-first century.
20
Payandeh, Hossein. "Waking nightmares : a critical study of Ian McEwan's novels". Thesis, University of Sussex, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.326934.
Testo completo
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Chan, Wing-chun Julia. "Towards an aesthetics of cliché cultural recycling and contemporary fiction /". Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2009. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B42182311.
Testo completo
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Balsom, Edwin James. "Dialogic regional voices, a study of selected contemporary Atlantic-Canadian fiction". Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0005/NQ42471.pdf.
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Robinson, Sally. "Engendering the subject : gender and self-representation in contemporary women's fiction /". Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9433.
Testo completo
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Franks, Jamie N. "Becoming Other: Virtual Realities in Contemporary Science Fiction". FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1908.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The purpose of this thesis was to explore the boundary between human and other created by virtual worlds in contemporary science fiction novels. After a close reading of the three novels: Surface Detail, Existence, and Lady of Mazes, and the application of contemporary literary theories, the boundary presented itself and led to the discovery of where the human becomes other. The human becomes other when it becomes lost to the virtual world and no longer exists or interacts with material reality. Each of the primary texts exhibits both virtual reality and humanity in different ways, and each is explored to find where humanity falls apart. Overall, when these theories are applied to real life there is no real way to avoid the potential for fully immersive virtual worlds, but there are ways to avoid their alienating effects.
25
Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth. "Womens historical fiction after feminism : discursive reconstructions of the Tudors in contemporary literature". Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86303.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Historical fiction is a genre in a constant state of flux: since its inception in the nineteenth century, it has been shaped by cultural trends and has persistently responded to the way in which history is popularly conceptualised. As such, historical novels have always revealed as much about the socio-political context of their moment of production as they do about their historical settings. The advent of feminism was among the most significant movements which shaped the evolution of the women’s historical novel in the twentieth century, prompting as it did a radical shift in historiographic methodology. As feminist discourse became embedded in popular culture in the latter decades of the twentieth century, this shift in turn allowed authors of historical fiction the opportunity to reconsider the ways in which women have been traditionally represented in both historical narrative and fiction. The historical novel thus became a site for exploring the female perspective of history, a perspective that had been denied or ignored by more male-centred historical narratives. This dissertation will assess the impact wrought by the popularisation of feminist discourse on the genre of women’s historical fiction during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An examination of a selection of contemporary women’s novels set during the Tudor era will prove particularly useful in executing this assessment, not least because of the Tudors’ unprecedented popularity as the focus of literature and film in the last decade. More significantly, the women of this period have proven to be ideal subjects for their authors to imaginatively reconstruct in the mould of third wave feminist icons in the twenty-first century. By examining how Tudor women have been represented in the contemporary historical fiction of Jean Plaidy, Philippa Gregory, Mavis Cheek, Suzannah Dunn and Emily Purdy, this dissertation will demonstrate the ways in which popular feminist discourse has impacted on the development of women’s historical fiction in the last century, focusing specifically on texts published within the last decade. Three key aspects of the genre will be assessed in detail in this regard: the author’s self-conscious feminist intervention in the characterisation of her historical heroines; the shift in the narrative perspective adopted and the deployment of postmodern literary devices; and the representation of female sexuality. The evolution of the genre as a whole will also be examined in some detail, and the shifting parameters of modern feminisms will be interrogated in order to fully understand their manifestations in popular culture.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Historiese fiksie is ’n voortdurend veranderende genre: sedert die ontstaan daarvan in die negentiende eeu is dit beïnvloed deur kulturele neigings en het dit aanhoudend bly reageer op die manier waarop die geskiedenis populêr gekonseptualiseer word. As sodanig het historiese romans altyd net soveel oor die sosiopolitieke konteks van hulle produksiemoment as oor hul historiese milieus onthul. Feminisme was een van die betekenisvolste bewegings wat gedurende die twintigste eeu die evolusie van die historiese roman vir vroue sou beïnvloed, en het sodoende aanleiding gegee tot ’n radikale verandering in historiografiese metodologie. Namate feministiese diskoers in die latere dekades van die twintigste eeu deel van die populêre kultuur geword het, het hierdie verandering op sy beurt die skrywers van historiese fiksie die geleentheid gegun om die maniere waarop vroue tradisioneel in sowel historiese narratief as fiksie uitgebeeld is, te heroorweeg. Die historiese roman het dus ’n terrein geword waarop die vroulike perspektief op die geskiedenis verken is, naamlik ’n perspektief wat deur meer manlik-gesentreerde historiese narratiewe ontken of geïgnoreer is. Hierdie verhandeling sal die impak evalueer wat die popularisering van feministiese diskoers op die genre van historiese fiksie vir vroue gemaak het tydens die twintigste en een-en-twintigste eeue. ’n Ondersoek na ’n seleksie van kontemporêre vroueromans wat in die Tudor-tydperk afspeel, is veral nuttig in hierdie verband, onder andere as gevolg van die Tudors se ongekende gewildheid as die fokus van letterkunde en film in die afgelope dekade. Wat meer veelseggend is, is dat dit blyk die vroue van hierdie tydperk was ideale subjekte wat verbeeldingryk deur hulle outeurs gerekonstrueer kon word in die vorm van derdegolf-feministiese ikone in die een-en-twintigste eeu. Deur te ondersoek hoe Tudorvroue uitgebeeld is in die kontemporêre historiese fiksie van Jean Plaidy, Philippa Gregory, Mavis Cheek, Suzannah Dunn en Emily Purdy sal hierdie verhandeling die impak demonstreer wat populêre feministiese diskoers in die afgelope eeu op die ontwikkeling van historiese fiksie vir vroue gemaak het, met die fokus spesifiek op tekste wat in die afgelope dekade gepubliseer is. In hierdie verband sal drie sleutelaspekte van die genre uitvoerig geassesseer word: die skrywer se selfbewuste feministiese ingryping in die karakterisering van haar historiese heldinne; die verskuiwing in die vertellingsperspektief en die ontplooiing van postmoderne letterkundige tegnieke; en die uitbeelding van vroulike seksualiteit. Die evolusie van die genre as geheel word ook beskou, en die veranderende parameters van moderne feminismes word ondervra sodat hul manifestasies in die populêre kultuur ten volle verstaan kan word.
26
Böhme, Anna Katharina [Verfasser]. "Challenging Englishness: Rebranding and rewriting national identity in contemporary English fiction / Anna Katharina Böhme". Gießen : Universitätsbibliothek, 2014. http://d-nb.info/1068223901/34.
Testo completo
27
Renger, Nicola. "Mapping and historiography in contemporary Canadian literature in English /". Frankfurt am Main [u.a.] : Lang, 2005. http://www.gbv.de/dms/bs/toc/490250424.pdf.
Testo completo
28
Neely, Sarah. "Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture : fiction to film". Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7486/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis examines the relationship of Irish and Scottish literature and film comparatively. The field of adaptation has traditionally centred around classical literary adaptations and the heritage film. Considering the increasing frequency with which contemporary novelists are adapted to film, it comes as a surprise that very little analysis has extended beyond the pages of the general media. Recent Irish and Scottish films in particular have relied upon the popularity of their literary exports in order to boost their indigenous filmmaking ventures. While generally considering the dialogic relationship between the publishing, film and television industries, this thesis specifically focuses on the adaptations of novels and short stories by Irish and Scottish writers from the 1980s to the present day. Part one, focusing on the work of Irish authors, looks at Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984) and Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985); Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997); Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy, comprising The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), The Snapper (Stephen Frears, 1993) and The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996); and Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). Part two examines the adaptations of Scottish writers, including Christopher Rush’s Venus Peter (Ian Seller, 1990); William McIlvanney’s The Big Man (David Leland, 1990) and Dreaming (Mike Alexander, 1990); Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996); and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002). Rather than carefully consider the fidelity of the translation from page to screen, this study examines the cultural circulation of the texts in alternative media in relation to their adaptive strategies. The novel’s role in representing ‘Irishness’ and ‘Scottishness’ versus and adapted film’s mode of representation is also considered alongside the influence of the director in contrast to the author, in order to reveal all of the contributing components to the development of a national cinema out of a national literature, both key components of a national culture.
29
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.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
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.
30
Rine, Abigail. "Words incarnate : contemporary women’s fiction as religious revision". Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1961.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis investigates the prevalence of religious themes in the work of several prominent contemporary women writers—Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts, Alice Walker and A.L. Kennedy. Relying on Luce Irigaray’s recent theorisations of the religious and its relationship to feminine subjectivity, this research considers the subversive potential of engaging with religious discourse through literature, and contributes to burgeoning criticism of feminist revisionary writing. The novels analysed in this thesis show, often in violent detail, that the way the religious dimension has been conceptualised and articulated enforces negative views of female sexuality, justifies violence against the body, alienates women from autonomous creative expression and paralyses the development of a subjectivity in the feminine. Rather than looking at women’s religious revision primarily as a means of asserting female authority, as previous studies have done, I argue that these writers, in addition to critiquing patriarchal religion, articulate ways of being and knowing that subvert the binary logic that dominates Western religious discourse. Chapter I contextualises this research in Luce Irigaray’s theories and outlines existing work on feminist revisionist literature. The remaining chapters offer close readings of key novels in light of these theories: Chapter II examines Atwood’s interrogation of oppositional logic in religious discourse through her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Chapter III explores two novels by Roberts that expose the violence inherent in religious discourse and deconstruct the subjection of the (female) body to the (masculine) Word. Chapters IV and V analyse the fiction of Kennedy and Walker respectively, revealing how their novels confront the religious denigration of feminine sexuality and refigure the connection between eroticism and divinity. Evident in each of these fictional accounts is a forceful critique of religious discourse, as well as an attempt to more closely reconcile foundational religious oppositions between divinity and humanity, flesh and spirit, and body and Word.
31
Gronewold, Laura. "Chick Lit and Its Canonical Forefathers: Anxieties About Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Women's Fiction". Diss., The University of Arizona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/238894.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This dissertation examines the anxieties that the contemporary genre of women’s fiction known as "chick lit" expresses about female sexuality, women and work, and the relationship between female identity and the global consumer marketplace. Furthermore, this project argues that chick lit can be productively traced to male-authored canonical texts that establish tropes and themes that chick lit novelists still grapple with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Chick lit heroines have benefitted from feminist progress, but they frequently participate in a backlash against the advances that empower them to pursue sexual pleasure outside marriage, find fulfilling careers, and challenge constructions of identity. Chapter 1 examines scholarship on constructions of gender and sexuality, affect theory, and Marxist theories. It also explores historical context through critiques of popular women writers. Chapter 2 argues that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) establishes the first-person confessional narrative voice and a sexualized secondary female character who is punished for her non-normative sexuality. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) demonstrate that female sexuality must still be negotiated and contained in postfeminist culture. Chapter 3 explores how work contributes to female agency in literature. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) depicts a heroine who successfully manages her gender, race, and class performances in order to thrive in an urban space, while Kate Reddy, from Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), must pass as a non-mother in order to participate in the affective economies that prevail in the gendered workplace. Chapter 4 analyzes the role of consumer culture in female subject formation in a capitalist material culture. In Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and Blake Edwards’s film version (1961), heroine Holly Golightly’s proximity to the luxury retailer legitimates her identity. But in Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (2000), heroine Becky Bloomwood struggles against a shopping addiction and strives to define herself outside of the discourse of consumerism. Overall, this dissertation provides an important contribution to the conversation on women’s writing and contemporary identity formation because it addresses literary criticism, contemporary culture, and constructions of female subjectivity.
32
Kecskes, Gabriella. "Representations of the Nation through Corporeal Narrativity in Contemporary Multicultural British Fiction". Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2010. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/61769.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
EnglishPh.D.
This dissertation focuses on the function of human bodies in articulations of the nation in contemporary British multicultural fiction, more specifically in novels by Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, and Monica Ali. Combining the Andersonean claim that narrative fiction is an especially sensitive medium for imagining the nation with Daniel Punday‘s assertion that the human body is the basic organizing principle of narrative structure, this study examines the ways in which corporeal representations in novels negotiate dominant paradigms of the national imaginary. Each chapter focuses on a key text from which it opens up the discussion to the authors‘ oeuvre. The study establishes the palimpsest as a mode of representation and interpretation of cultural and national identities showcased in Rushdie‘s The Moor‘s Last Sigh. The fragmentation of narrative and human subjectivity via the trope of the palimpsest in this novel is central to conceptualizations of the nation in Rushdie‘s oeuvre as well as in the other texts in this study. Based on the make-up of Rushdie‘s palimpsests, the characters‘ bodies manifest not a mixture of different elements but a conglomerate of often mutually exclusive, yet intrinsically combined alternatives. For V. S. Naipaul, the function of corporeality is the negotiation of the national imaginary via representations of narrative space. In The Enigma of Arrival as in his other novels, Naipaul uses circuitous movement and palimpsestic layering of the kinetic space to complicate agency for his characters, to emphasize the illusory nature of narrative authority, and to call attention to the ambiguous operations of national and postcolonial discourse. Hanif Kureishi‘s The Body among his other novels shows a ground-breaking attitude toward the possibilities of narrativity in the age of transmutable corporeality. His characters‘ diminishing corporeal presence is the source of their agency and their increasingly complex cultural identifications. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali‘s keen attention to kinetic space creates unexpected ripples in the narration and the protagonist‘s cultural identification, which shift the meaning of the novel from an optimistic ethnic/gender emancipation narrative to claiming agency by resisting cultural affiliations.
Temple University--Theses
33
Ingham, Michael Anthony. "Theatre of storytelling : the prose fiction stage adaptation as social allegory in contemporary British drama /". Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B20275961.
Testo completo
34
Casero, Eric E. "Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness in American Fiction, 1980-2010". UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/38.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing their characters to live in mental worlds of their own making. While the novel, as a genre, often depicts alienation as a condition deriving from a character’s status as a social outcast, the texts featured in this study treat it as a condition inherent to consciousness, derived from what their creators envision as an inevitable separation of mind from world. Rather than bemoan alienation as a loss of social connectedness, these texts portray it as inherent to mental life.
The chapters of this dissertation explore the particular visions of alienation that emerge in each of these texts. In a chapter on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I argue that Howie, the novel’s protagonist, views his mind as a machine that operates according to self-sufficient, automatic processes. My analysis of David Markson’s final novels demonstrates that Markson portrays artistic creation as a process through which individual consciousness is isolated from society. David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion treats alienation as a general human condition, as Wallace’s interests in loneliness and solipsism derive, I argue, from his assumptions about the individualized nature of consciousness. Finally, in a chapter on The Truman Show, I argue that the film’s sense of paranoia stems from its protagonist’s sense of being alone in his worldview. I thus present a corpus of works that maintain a close, limited focus on singular fictional minds, shutting out social and physical environments in order to depict the mind as a cloistered, self-enclosed entity. My analysis highlights the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of these narratives render consciousness as an isolating force, stranding fictional characters on mental islands of their own making.
35
Rosales, Lauren N. ""Dismissed outright": creating a space for contemporary genre fiction within neo-Victorian studies". Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6259.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Neo-Victorian studies is a burgeoning subfield which seeks to examine contemporary representations of the Victorian period. For the last decade, neo-Victorian scholars have offered up definitions of what makes a text “neo-Victorian”; often, this has been via a description of what the neo-Victorian is not. The ‘ruling’ definition—i.e., the definition most consistently repeated—hails from the introduction to Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn: “the Neo-Victorian is more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. […] texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (4). This short delineation significantly comes at the expense of historical fiction, which is a move repeated throughout neo-Victorian efforts to define itself. Neo-Victorian studies has largely concerned itself with literary novels, operating with a heavy anxiety that ‘other’ fiction set in the nineteenth century is escapist and nostalgic in the sense that it simply perpetuates problematic past systems of oppression while evoking the fashionable aesthetic trappings of the Victorian. My dissertation argues that contemporary genre fiction, long derided as ‘simply’ escapist in nature, can also be neo-Victorian. In each of my chapters I analyze texts from a specific genre—steampunk, popular romance, detective fiction, and Sherlock Holmes pastiche—in order to offer a basis for investigating genre fiction with a neo-Victorian lens. I analyze the depiction of corsets and feminist protagonists in three steampunk novels, explore the exhibition of unlikely romantic heroines and Romany romantic heroes in Lisa Kleypas’ historical romance series about the Hathaway family, examine representations of class and gender as well as germane social issues in Anne Perry’s William Monk detective series, and highlight the feminist potential of Carole Nelson Douglas’ series of Sherlock Holmes pastiche featuring Irene Adler. Each chapter considers the Victorian period as represented alongside Victorian novels and literary periodicals in order to demonstrate the shape of these neo-Victorian revisions and make the case the genre fiction can be self-conscious despite its lack of metafictional content.
36
Kamali, Leila Francesca. "Spectres of the shore : the memory of Africa in contemporary African-American and Black British fiction". Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4110/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This study considers the approach in recent African-American and Black British fiction toward the cultural memory of Africa. Following a brief consideration of the relationship between contemporary conceptions of African-American and Black British cultural identities, I examine the ways in which the imaginative journeys and geographies, evoked by the ideals of Africa and 'Africanness', are employed in the negotiation of historical memory, and in the endeavour to situate black identity in the context of contemporary American and British society. My discussion addresses these questions, initially, in four novels by African-American writers: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983), and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990). I argue that African-American writers situate a memory of an African past within an African-American present, through a form of historical memory which is sensitive not only to tradition, but also to the practice of 'possession'. This fluid form of memory, characteristic of a voodoo tradition, and also, these writers suggest, of a diversity of African-American artforms, allows knowledge of African tradition to be situated within the American present, but is broadly denied by an American trend of forgetfulness toward the past, and devalued by institutionalised racism. African-American texts present uses of language in which the linguistic and the pre-linguistic realms are felt to be continuous with one another, in response to an American language which is centrally occupied by the fraught relationship between black and white Americans. The second half of this study examines the memory of Africa in three Black British works, including Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1991), S.1. Martin's Incomparable World (1996), and Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997). I suggest here that Black British authors employ the cultural memory of Africa not as an inheritance which is connected to a known 'tradition', but as one of a diverse number of inheritances which are negotiated as part of the process of situating identity as flexible, individual, and unfinished. The memory of Africa is figured as frozen in the past, along with a range of other cultural inheritances, which are taken up and redramatised in the present as part of an attempt to recover the inherent diversity at the heart of an oppressive British fiction of linearity, and of uniform 'whiteness'. Where Britain, historically, has been silent on Britain's black presence, Black British writers simply speak into that silence. Emerging from this fruitful comparison between the two literatures is a sense of the contrasting approaches which are made by black writers toward notions of tradition and the performance of identity, in the context of two very different national histories, and as part of fundamental strategies of survival employed in contemporary social settings. These dramatisations are interrogated against continuous issues of race and racism, but also as diverse solutions for identity where national contexts bear a contrasting significance in an age which is increasingly globalised, and in which imperial power has shifted, and continues to shift, between Britain and America.
37
MacDonald, Deneka C. "Locating resistance/resisting location : a feminist literary analysis of supernatural women in contemporary fantastic fiction". Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5344/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
In this thesis I examine the ways in which feminist and human geographies intersect with contemporary women-centred fantasy fiction. In particular, I consider space and place to be significant to female characters in their role as a physical presence as well as an intangible location. Thus I explore the forest, the body and the mind as territories occupied by the supernatural women. These various spatial themes, I suggest, outline distinctive locations for supernatural female characters and enable them to engage in a position of resistance from patriarchal ideologies. Through a spatial analysis of selected fiction, I reflect on challenges to notions that construct identity, gender and sexuality as well as conflict among women. I argue that the supernatural woman in fiction has been frozen in one-dimensional representation within traditional male-centred texts. This one-dimensionally, I suggest, hinges on the juxtaposition of the overly simplistic good/bad binary that has often illustrated female characters within fantasy fiction. As fantasy is a genre typically more concerned with worlds than characters, the women-centred fantasy text is unique in its exploration and pursuit of the literary character. Given the contemporary and interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, I have drawn upon filmic adaptations of texts at times to illustrate a further level of cultural awareness. The main emphasis is, however, on literary texts and, thus, reference to film is meant to supplement my textual analysis.
38
Boettcher, Anna Margarete. "Through Women's Eyes: Contemporary Women's Fiction about the Old West". PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4966.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.
39
Myers, Tony. "Postmodernism and historicity : narrative forms in the contemporary novel". Thesis, University of Stirling, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1809.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This study proposes that modernity is constitutively based upon a synchronic temporality which perpetuates the present of the ego. Within this matrix, history is subject to the processes of subjectivization and the 'otherness' of the past disappears. Postmodernism, it is argued, designates the attempt to disinter a properly historical thinking, or historicity, from the recursive temporality of the modern. This attempt is predicated upon the retroactive temporality of the future perfect which, whilst also a synchrony, arises from a productive tension between the past, the present and the future. The self-divisive time of the future perfect expedites the discomfiture of the ego and its concomitant subjectivization of the past and, by so doing, registers the historicity of that past. The relation between the modern and the postmodern forms of temporality is expressed by the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and symbolic orders. It is argued, moreover, that this distinction is manifest in the narrative forms of the contemporary novel. Whilst the modern form of the contemporary novel replicates the structures of an egocentric repletion of synchrony, the postmodern novel displaces this imaginary problematic to the symbolic. By employing a variety of techniques founded upon retroactivity, postmodern novels are thereby shown to foster a disclosure of the structure of historicity. Within this rubric five novels are given extended consideration: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and John Banville's Doctor Copernicus.
40
Jack, Rosemary. "The power and pleasure of women's laughter : an exploration of the use of humour in contemporary fiction written by women". Thesis, Lancaster University, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.249815.
Testo completo
41
Sveen, Hanna Andersdotter. ""Honourable" or "Highly-sexed" : Adjectival Descriptions of Male and Female Characters in Victorian and Contemporary Children's Fiction". Doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, Department of English, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-6247.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This corpus-based study examines adjectives and adjectival expressions used to describe characters in British children’s fiction. The focus is on diachronic variation, by comparing Victorian (19th-century) and contemporary (late 20th-century) children’s fiction, and on gender variation, by comparing the descriptions of female and male characters. I adopt a qualitative as well as a quantitative approach, and consider factors such as lexical diversity, adjectival density, collocation patterns, evaluative meaning, syntactic function and distribution across semantic domains. Most findings are related to a dichotomy set up between an idealistic and a realistic portrayal of characters. The study shows that an idealistic portrayal of characters is typical of the Victorian material and a realistic portrayal of characters typical of the contemporary material. Further, gender differences are much more pronounced, and reflect traditional gender role patterns more in the Victorian material than in the contemporary material. For instance, a pleasant appearance is typically described for Victorian female characters and social position for Victorian male characters. Moreover, descriptions of mental properties of Victorian female characters are conspicuously rare. Such gendered patterns are less distinct in the contemporary material, although appearance is still more extensively described for female than male characters. As regards how the qualities are attributed to characters, the descriptions of Victorian female characters were found to be the most formulaic compared to the descriptions of Victorian male, contemporary female and contemporary male characters.
42
Cook, Adele M. "Genre, gender and nation : ideological and intertextual representation in contemporary Arthurian fiction for children". Thesis, University of Bedfordshire, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10547/583211.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Within late twentieth and early twenty-first century children’s literature there is a significant interest amongst authors and readers for material which recreates the Arthurian myth. Many of these draw on medieval texts, and the canonical texts of the English tradition have been particularly influential. Yet within this intertextual discourse the influence of the Victorian works is noticeable. This thesis explores the relationship between contemporary children’s Arthuriana and the gendered and national ideologies of these earlier works. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, it discusses the evolution of Arthuriana for the child reader, with a particular focus on four contemporary texts: Michael Morpurgo’s (1994) Arthur, High King of Britain, Mary Hoffman’s (2000) Women of Camelot: Queens and Enchantresses at the Court of King Arthur, Diana Wynne Jones’ (1993) Hexwood and the BBC series Merlin (2008-2012). Exploring the historicist and fantasy genres opens up a discourse surrounding the psychology of myth which within the context of Arthurian literature creates a sense of a universal ‘truth’. This work reveals that authorial intent, in both historicist and fantasy narratives, is often undercut by implicit ideologies which reveal unconscious cultural assumptions. The cultural context at the time of textual production and consumption affects the representations of both the ideologies of gender and nation and yet the authority of myth and history combine to create a regressive depiction more in keeping with literature from the Victorian and post-World War II eras. This is explored through a review of the literature for children available since the Age of Reason, and the didactic model which has been prevalent throughout the Arthurian genre. This thesis explores why a regressive representation is appealing within a twenty-first century discourse through an engagement with theories of feminism(s) and postfeminism. This thesis ascertains why the psychology of myth affects the reimagining of Arthuriana, and explores the retrospective nature of intertextuality in order to reflect on the trend for regressive representations in children’s Arthurian literature.
43
Johnstone, Michael. "Liberty or death : a practical and theoretical exploration of alternatives to free will and determinism in contemporary historical fiction". Thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2011. http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/2009/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The thesis combines creative and critical work integrated into a single text. The text is presented as the work of a PhD student whose project has been supervised by the disillusioned Professor Thrib. The student plans to write the fictionalised biography of Elsie Stewart, a working class Belfast woman whose life intersected with the defining dramas of twentieth century history. His research diary describes how he and his translator, Lempi, began to reconstruct Elsie's life from archive sources scattered across Europe, and his early output is literary prose of the sort one would expect to find in a historical novel. However, Professor Thrib has built his career on an eccentric form of post-structuralism, and pushed to breaking point by the bureaucracy and double-speak of the university, Thrib demands his student desists from using personal pronouns or any other grammatical structures that imply originative action. As the conclusion of Elsie's story is told in increasingly bizarre fragments, the student looks for answers through close readings of recent historical fictions (In Country, Libra, Midnight's Children, The Passion, Philadelphia Fire, Possession, Star Turn, and Waterland), in the theories of selected modern philosophers (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard), and in the eccentric publications of Professor Thrib and other imaginary academics. Unable to account for human agency theoretically, he seeks a new writing that effaces the subject as originator of action; at the same time, however, he obsesses over the human drives of emotion, desire, and corporeal experience. As the student struggles with the bureaucracy of the university and his unrequited infatuation with his translator, what emerges is a novel approach to the question of free will and determinism that goes beyond 'death of the subject' literature. Additionally, the thesis uses skills from a range of disciplines including Creative Writing, English Literature, History, Philosophy, and Social Science, and in its interdisciplinary ambition it argues for the value of art and theory in an increasingly mercantile Higher Education sector.
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Kindler, Jessica Claire. "Tokuya Higashigawa's After-Dinner Mysteries: Unusual Detectives in Contemporary Japanese Mystery Fiction". PDXScholar, 2013. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/1011.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The detective fiction (tantei shōsetsu) genre is one that came into Japan from the West around the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), and soon became wildly popular. Again in recent years, detective fiction has experienced a popularity boom in Japan, and there has been an outpouring of new detective fiction books as well as various television and movie adaptations. It is not a revelation that the Japanese detective fiction genre, while rife with imitation and homage to Western works, took a dramatic turn somewhere along the line, away from celebrated models like Poe, Doyle, and Christie, and developed into a unique subgenre of Japanese prose. However, despite its popularity and innovation, Japanese detective fiction has often been categorized as popular literature (taishū bungaku), which is historically disregarded as vulgar and common.
My thesis first consists of a brief introductory history oftantei shōsetsugenre in Japan. This includes a discussion of Japanese writers' anxiety concerning imitation of Western forms and their perception of themselves as imposters and imitators. Following this, I examine the ways in whichtantei shōsetsuwriters--particularly Edogawa Ranpo (1894 - 1965), the grandfather of the genre in Japan--began to deviate from the Western model in the 1920's. At the same time, I investigate the bias againsttantei shōsetsuas a vulgar or even pornographic genre. Through a discussion of literary critic Karatani Kōjin's ideas on the construction of depth in literature, I will demonstrate how Edogawa created, through his deviance from the West, a new kind of construction in detective fiction to bring a different sort of depth to what was generally considered merely a popular and shallow genre.
This discussion includes a look at the ideas of Tsubouchi Shōyō on writing modern novels, and Japanese conceptions of "pure" (junsui) and "popular" (taishū) literature. Through an examination of several of Edogawa's works and his use of psychology in creating interiority in his characters, I propose that the depth configuration, put forth by Karatani in his critique of canonical modern Japanese literature, is also present in popular fiction, like Edogawa'stantei shōsetsu. When viewed through the lens of Karatani's depth paradigm, we discover how detective fiction and the vulgarity therein may actually have more in common with "pure" fiction created by those writers who followed Shōyō's prescriptions.
In the final section of the introduction, I propose a definition of Japanese detective fiction that links Edogawa's works from the 1920's to the contemporary Japanese detective novel After-Dinner Mysteries (Nazotoki wa dinaa no ato de, 2010), by Higashigawa Tokuya. Thus we see that many of the themes and conventions present in Edogawa remain prevalent in contemporary writing. Finally, I present my translation of the first two chapters of After-Dinner Mysteries.
45
Mackinnon, Jeremy E. "Speaking the unspeakable : war trauma in six contemporary novels". Title page, contents and abstract only, 2001. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phm15821.pdf.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258) Presents readings of six novels which depict something of the nature of war trauma. Collectively, the novels suggest that the attempt to narrativise war trauma is inherently problematic. Traces the disjunctions between narrative and war trauma which ensure that war trauma remains an elusive and private phenomonen; the gulf between private experience and public discourse haunts each of the novels.
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Gantzert, Patricia L. "Throwing voices, dialogism in the novels of three contemporary Canadian women writers". Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq23313.pdf.
Testo completo
47
Tenshak, Juliet. "Bearing witness to an era : contemporary Nigerian fiction and the return to the recent past". Thesis, University of Stirling, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/27349.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The body of writing collectively referred to as third generation or contemporary Nigerian literature emerged on the international literary scene from about the year 2000. This writing is marked by attempts to negotiate contemporary identities, and it engages with various developments in the Nigerian nation: Nigeria’s past and current political and socio-economic state, different kinds of cultural hybridization as well as the writers increasing transnational awareness. This study argues that contemporary Nigerian fiction obsessively returns to the period from 1985-1998 as a historical site for narrating the individual and collective Nigerian experience of the trauma of military dictatorship, which has shaped the contemporary reality of the nation. The study builds on existing critical work on contemporary Nigerian fiction, in order to highlight patterns and ideas that have hitherto been neglected in scholarly work in this field. The study seeks to address this gap in the existing critical literature by examining third-generation Nigerian writing’s representation of this era in a select corpus of work spanning from 2000-06: Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain (2000), Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002), Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come (2005), and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2006). The four novels chosen were written in response to military rule and dictatorship in the 80s and 90s, and they all feature representations of state violence. This study finds that, despite variations in the novels aesthetic modes, violence, control, silencing, dictatorship, alienation, the trauma of everyday life and resistance recur in realist modes. Above all, the study argues that contemporary Nigerian fiction’s insistent representation of the violent past of military rule in Nigeria is a means of navigating the complex psychological and political processes involved in dealing with post-colonial trauma by employing writing as a form of resistance.
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Rasevych, Peter. "Reading native literature from a traditional indigenous perspective, contemporary novels in a Windigo society". Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/MQ60865.pdf.
Testo completo
49
Friedman, Amy Lynn. "Menippean satire or counter-realism? : questions of genre in contemporary Indian fiction in English by Menen, Desani, Rushdie, and Sealy". Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.504777.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The focus of my argument is that much of the counter-realist elements in postcolonial writing can be better u'nderstood in the more traditional terms of Menippean satire. I explore this premise in works by a cohort of four South East Asian authors of satire who have never previously been examined in concert as such: Aubrey Menen, G.V. Desani, Salman Rushdie, and I. Allan Sealy. My investigations have uncovered connections of influence and resonance which make an assiduous case for considering their work as Menippean satire, running counter to extant critical discussions of experimentalism in postcolonial fiction which tend to describe counter-realism in terms of anti-realism, postrealism, and magic realism. In examining Menippean satire I will also be addressing the current wide use of the term, and suggesting that an over-emphasis on its counter-realist and hybrid elements has led to an unfortunate disregard of its roots in satire. Respective chapters on Menen and Desani look at their use of intertextual juxtapositions which begin to shape a postcolonial emphasis on revision and renewal of novelistic language and form. This emphasis is borne out in my examination of Rushdie's Menippean experiments with language and the rhetorical device of ekpllrasis to break down boundaries between cultures, histories, and even art forms to depict a hybrid model of global society. I interpret Sealy's·perpetual reformatting of the novel in each new work as a series of Menippean challenges to form which assert alternative narrative perspectives and relocate literal)' traditions. My conclusion looks at the implications of expanding the current limited critical links between satire and postcolonial literature in general, based on my examination of a body of work that connects to and updates the longstanding tradition of Menippean satire.
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Fratini, Claudia Caia Julia. "Beyond the invisible a representation of magic in contemporary fantasy literature /". Pretoria : [s.n.], 2005. http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-06172005-113436/.
Testo completo