Dissertationen zum Thema „Fantasy fiction, American – Fiction“
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1
Sanchez-Taylor, Joy Ann. „Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity“. Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5302.
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Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity examines the influence of science fiction/fantasy (SFF) as applied to twentieth century and contemporary African American, Native American and Latina/o texts. Bringing together theories of racial identity, hybridity, and postcolonialism, this project demonstrates how twentieth century and contemporary ethnic American SFF authors are currently utilizing tropes of SFF to blur racial distinctions and challenge white/other or colonizer/colonized binaries. Ethnic American SFF authors are able to employ SFF landscapes that address narratives of victimization or colonization while still imagining worlds where alternate representations of racial and ethnic identity are possible.
My multicultural approach pairs authors of different ethnicities in order to examine common themes that occur in ethnic American SFF texts. The first chapter examines SFF post-apocalyptic depictions of racial and ethnic identity in Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Chapter two explores depictions of ethnic undead figures in Octavia Butler's Fledgling and Daniel José Older's "Phantom Overload." Chapter three addresses themes of indigenous and migrant colonization in Celu Amberstone's "Refugees" and Rosura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148.
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Hall, Rebecca Thomas Ron. „The fantastic and related subgenres in three contemporary novels“. Waco, Tex. : Baylor University, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/4190.
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Crotty, Tammy J. „Left of mainstream : genre fiction and its ability to transcend formula“. Virtual Press, 2005. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1313073.
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This collection of short stories studies the elements of genre fiction and applies them to literary fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror have specific manners in which they speak to an audience. By using these elements, for example the desensitization of the current generation of readers to most horrors, an author can demonstrate the core of the human relationship to pain, faith, or hope. Though some genre fiction seems to fit certain formulas, there are also horror or science fiction stories which do not fit a conventional mold. This collection sets forth to break away from genre fiction conventions. Also, this project utilizes the genre of magical realism, which is the medium between genre fiction and literary fiction, by using fantastic events within a mundane setting to emphasize the author's ideas. By bridging the gap between genres, magical realism reveals how interrelated the elements of all genres are. In this study stories use magical and horrifying events while maintaining an intention beyond the formulaic thrill. Therefore, genre fiction can have a place amongst literature.Department of English
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Davies, Lynda Mary. „Susan Cooper's heightened reality : how narrative style, metaphor, symbol and myth facilitate the imaginative exploration of moral and ethical issues /“. St. Lucia, Qld, 2001. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe16530.pdf.
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Jenike, Elizabeth. „Blood of the Windmaker“. Miami University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1417439734.
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Varnado, Ethan C. „A Wonder Book“. VCU Scholars Compass, 2017. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4965.
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This thesis is a collection of nine short stories about real people dealing with unreal problems. In one story, a small-town man answers a knock at his door, only to find three wisemen, who have followed a star and proclaimed him as their new messiah. In another, a reporter travels across the snowy length of Canada looking to interview people who have witnessed the Virgin Mary materialize above Toronto. Deranged Egyptologists, vampires with diseased blood, wacky witches, and unhappy mediums all inhabit tales whose landscapes span the distance between Chattanooga, Tennessee and the afterlife.
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Lacy, Dianna C. „Expanding the Definition of Liminality: Speculative Fiction as an Exploration of New Boundaries“. ScholarWorks@UNO, 2019. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2698.
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Speculative fiction allows an expanded view of literature and so allows scholars to explore new boundaries in the way words and ideas work. In the titular character of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, the reader sees an expansion of self through liminality while A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick explores its collapse. In order to portray each of these the character examined must move though one seems to move upward and the other downward. This idea of movement is only part of what expands the idea of liminality past the traditional idea of a doorway to create a hallway that the character might traverse on the way from place to place. This is not a redefinition of the term but a revision, a change in the way that we look at the concept as we accept and explore newer genres.
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Smith, Roslyn Nicole. „Medias Res, Temporal Double-Consciousness and Resistance in Octavia Butler's Kindred“. unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11242007-230409/.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Title from file title page. Elizabeth West, committee chair; Layli Phillips, Kameelah Martin Samuel, committee members. Electronic text (52 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Jan. 30, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).
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Drolet, Cynthia L. (Cynthia Lea). „Four Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction“. Thesis, North Texas State University, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500548/.
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This thesis contains four stories of fantasy and science fiction. Four story lengths are represented: the short short ("Dragon Lovers"), the shorter short story ("Homecoming"), the longer short story ("Shadow Mistress"), and the novel ("Sword of Albruch," excerpted here).
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Hirst, Miriam Laufey. „Fantasy and feminism : an intersectional approach to modern children's fantasy fiction“. Thesis, University of Bolton, 2018. http://ubir.bolton.ac.uk/1968/.
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This thesis compares modern children’s fantasy literature with older texts, particularly Grimms’ fairy tales. The focus is on tropes from fairy tales and myths that devalue women and femininity. In looking at these tropes, this thesis examines how they are used in modern fiction; whether they are subverted to show a more empowering vision of femininity or simply replicated in a more modern guise. Whereas other approaches in this area have addressed the representation of gender in an isolated fashion, this study adopts an intersectional approach, examining the way that different axes of oppression work together to maintain the patriarchal hegemony of powerful, white, heterosexual men. As intersectional theory has pointed out, mainstream feminism has tended to focus only on the needs and rights of more privileged women, who are themselves complicit in the oppression of their more marginalised “sisters”. Intersectional feminism, in contrast, seeks to dismantle the entire system of interlinked oppressions, rather than allowing some women to benefit from it to the detriment of others. The intersectional issues around feminism that this thesis addresses include race, disability, class, and sexuality. There is also an emphasis on female solidarity, which is championed as an effective strategy to weaken the hold of patriarchy and subvert it in its aim to “divide and conquer”. It is this intersectional approach to children’s fantasy literature that is seen as the thesis’s main contribution to knowledge. The primary texts under examination are mainly from the United Kingdom, but also include works from the United States, Australia, and Germany. All of them were originally published between 1980 and 2013. The thesis explores heroism, beauty, magic, and gender performance in these works, showing how such themes can be dealt with in ways that are either reactionary and detrimental or progressive and empowering.
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Schwartz, Devan. „American Cuerpos“. PDXScholar, 2012. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/97.
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On election night 2008, a child is conceived by two Barack Obama campaign staffers--Daniel from Seattle, Anza from Honduras. American Cuerpos is a novel about the body and the body politic, about what it means to give birth through the eyes of both mother and father.
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Lopez, Miguel Anthony. „New World Massive“. PDXScholar, 2017. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3675.
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A New World, At Last is set on a distant colony world, many thousands of years into the future.
The path there has not been direct or bloodless. The humans who colonized this New World are the descendants of an Earth that has suffered cataclysmic climate change, collapse, and a subsequent millennia-long reconstruction. They stand on the shoulders of giants, uncovering and exploiting the technology of the Old Earth in order to ensure that such a collapse, once discovered, can never happen again. These new people, Colonials, set about making the New World in the image of their own.
A scant hundred years after they settle the world, the Ecumene arrive.
The Ecumene are humans as well, our own descendants, refugees who packed onto massive, life-sustaining generation ships that left Old Earth, burning a slow and steady path towards distant, potentially habitable worlds. The journey for the Ecumene took nearly a thousand years; in this time, a cult of destiny and destination fomented aboard a ship they began to see as their ark. They follow The Path, the way to the promised land of the New World, known to their distant ancestors as their ultimate destination.
Due to the realities of space travel, time passed differently for the Ecumene than it did for the Colonials. What was a thousand year journey on the ship translates to a more than six thousand year period of time back on Earth. The massive gulf in time and experience makes for a difficult reunion between these two disparate relatives.
Tensions arise as the Colonial Administration attempts to process these sudden arrivals and to integrate them into their system to prevent a complete collapse of their nascent biome. They hold the revelatory memory of a world subjected to poor stewardship and shy away from continuing down that path again. They see themselves as outnumbered and unfairly burdened, the sudden caretakers of a vast population of the children of the humans who sent the Old Earth into a long, terrible dark age.
The bulk of A New World, At Last takes place thirty years after the arrival of the Ecumene ark, the Armstrong. A New World, At Last follows Edison Moss, the young son of a Colonial farmer ("agrineer"). Ed has recently discovered that he was adopted illegally; he is undocumented, from an unwanted class. In an act of rebellion, he leaves home on a quest of discovery, only to find that the answers he gets are not necessarily the answers to the questions he wanted to ask. His decade-long journey takes him from the heart of the colony to the frontier; along the way he befriends an agent of the Ecumene's more violent resistant group and becomes a participant in the movement.
A New World, At Last also follows the story of an artist contemporary with Ed's time. Victor James Custodio, famous sculptor and crafter of prosthetic bodies for the rulers of Earth, flees to the New World in a quest to outrun a fate that has been chasing him through all of his lives. Victor's story parallels Ed's in a sense as both are, ultimately, pilgrimages; attempts to ask and have answered that ultimate question: who am I, where do I belong, and what do I do about it?
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Brooks, Emily Ruth-Diehl. „Hypha“. TopSCHOLAR®, 2019. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/3141.
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For hundreds of years, Ona and her people have been unknowingly enslaved. Ona has given everything she is to the spiritual people on the mountain, including her own son. So when rumors spread through the swamp’s magical mycelium that she and her people are slaves, Ona must find the truth and, if possible, reunite with her son before he becomes as evil as those who raised him. Meanwhile, her son has his own doubts after his people leave his friend to die. As he and Ona journey separately to save the people they love, they find everything they believed to be true falling apart, making room for a new kind of faith and life.
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Knez, Dora. „"The Release" : a creative writing thesis“. Thesis, McGill University, 1991. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=60609.
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The genre of fantasy contains texts which are unlike, or distance from, the real or empirical world--the world of the reader's experience. Nevertheless, fantasy texts can reveal truths which are relevant to the empirical world, and thus fantasy texts can be said to have cognitive value. The notion of possible worlds, the semiotic theory of metaphor, and a discussion of ambiguity are the three critical approaches used to investigate the cognitive value of fantasy texts. The stories in this collection provide a sampler of fantasy figures--such as mermaids, ghosts and living mummies--and make use of the emotional power of ambiguity.
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Barker, Emily Jane. „American detective fiction : four transformations“. Thesis, University of Essex, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.485340.
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Vaisarova, Julie. „Witches, Warlocks, and...Fulgurites?: Learning Information from Fantasy Fiction“. Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/470.
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Although fictional stories are not always an accurate source of information about the world, research has suggested that readers encode information from such stories in a manner that allows it to be freely retrieved and used in later situations. The present study compared readers’ use of novel information from realistic and fantasy fiction to examine whether this apparent lack of compartmentalization stems from readers’ assumption that fictional stories accurately portray reality. In an adaptation of Marsh, Meade, and Roediger’s (2003) paradigm, 259 adult United States residents read a realistic or fantasy story containing a series of obscure facts and then answered a purportedly unrelated set of questions that asked about these facts. Participants’ processing of novel story information differed by genre, such that participants who read a fantasy story were less likely to use information from the story on the subsequent test than participants who read a realistic story. Although this effect was not explained by participants’ trust in the source genre’s veracity, participants’ confidence in answers attributed solely to the experimental story suggested that there was a component of post-retrieval evaluation based on perceptions of the source genre. Together, these results suggest that readers’ processing of information from realistic and fantasy fiction differs, such that readers may be partly protected from using potentially inaccurate information from fantasy stories in later situations. However, the precise point in the process of encoding, retrieval, and application where these differences arise, and their implications for readers’ acquisition of misinformation, remains to be specified.
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Notaro, Anna. „Fluctuations of fantasy : postmodernist contamination in Angela Carter's fiction“. Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1996. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2969/.
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What I am offering in this thesis is a kind "contaminated" reading, that is a reading deeply involved in the stylistic and ideological dissonances of Carter's fiction, to the point that they are assimilated within different and, in some cases, contrastive interpretative paths. But the contamination works also on another level: to read Carter is to tackle some very complex questions, including the possible articulations of Marxism and deconstruction/postmodernism or, more generally, the role played by ideology with reference to the tendencies and movements deriving from poststructuralism; my argument is that Carter's writing itself is heavily "contaminated" by postmodernist aesthetics despite her implicit denial and negative attitude towards it. In the thesis I have discussed three collections of short-stones (The Bloody Chamber in Chapter 1, Black Venus and Fireworks in Chapter II) and four novels (The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, The Passion of New Eve. Nights at Circus and Wise Children from Chapter HI to VI). I have also quoted extensively from the numerous interviews given by Carter in different stages of her career and from her critical works, in particular from The Sadeian Woman, a sort of aesthetic manifesto for a literary corpus in which the worlds of Eros and sexuality play a crucial role in transgressing and subverting the habitual dichotomies of gender. In the final Chapter (VII) Carter's work is located in the framework of the debate between feminist and postmodernist thought.
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Gomez, Melissa Anne. „Influences of Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom on Bias“. W&M ScholarWorks, 2015. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626814.
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Flegal, Kathleen M. „Magic words the phonology of fantasy neologisms /“. Fairfax, VA : George Mason University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1920/3283.
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Thesis (M.A,)--George Mason University, 2008.Vita: p. 78. Thesis director: Steven Weinberger. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 11, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-77). Also issued in print.
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Pavlik, Anthony. „A view from elsewhere : the spatiality of children's fantasy fiction“. Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1891.
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Fantasy other worlds are often seen as alternatives with which to critique the ‘real’ world, or as offering spaces where child protagonists can take advantage of the otherness they encounter in their own process of maturation. However, such readings of fantasy other worlds, rather than celebrating heterogeneity, implicitly see ‘other’ spaces as ‘unreal’ and there either to support the real in some way, as being in some way inferior to the real, or in need of salvation by protagonists from the real world. This thesis proposes a reading of such texts that draws on social theories of constructed spatiality in order to examine first how, to varying degrees, and depending upon the attitude of authors towards the figure of the child, such ‘fantasy’ places can be seen as potentially real “thirdspaces” of performance and agency for protagonists, and thus as neutral spaces of activity rather than confrontation or growth and, second, how such presentations may be seen as reflecting back into the potential for the spatial activity of readers.
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Holappa, H. (Harri). „The information-seeking behaviour of science fiction and fantasy writers“. Master's thesis, University of Oulu, 2017. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201702231225.
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The topic of this master’s thesis is the information-seeking behaviour of creative writers in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. The artistic information-seeking behaviour on the whole has been the subject of only a handful of published studies, and creative writer studies have been almost non-existent. This study utilized the online questionnaire method with an emphasis on Likert items and nonparametric statistical analysis to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the information sources and channels used by SF&F writers in the three work roles of creative writing proposed by this study: the researcher, artisan and entrepreneur roles? 2) What characteristics of information sources are seen by SF&F writers to be the most important? 3) How writing genre, writing experience, writer attainment and gender affect their choice of information sources and channels? 4) What information barriers do they experience? The questionnaire was submitted to 16 English-speaking SF&F forums, drawing 130 participants from nine forums. The findings suggest that the information-seeking behaviour of SF&F writers is characterized by a heavy use of search engines, interpersonal sources and ‘the self’ as an information source. In the researcher role, additional importance is given to online encyclopedias and databases, to fiction and non-fiction, and to the nature and environment. Information-seeking in the artisan role is not associated with any particular sources, albeit buying behaviour might be higher. Information seeking in the entrepreneur role was shown to be more interpersonal in nature than in the other two roles. The most important source characteristic for SF&F writers is trustworthiness. Scifi writers are more frequent users of online news services than fantasy writers in the researcher role. Accumulating writing experience is associated with more frequent use of public libraries, archives and museums. Starting writers tend to use scholars and experts less. Those with 6–10 years of experience may have entered a period in their writing lives when career-related information seeking from online databases, media-sharing services and online news services is higher. Female writers tend to be more enthusiastic users of other people’s experiences in the researcher role, and of various channels of learning to write in the artisan and entrepreneur roles. AWriter attainment is slightly correlated with the writer having a little higher tolerance on poor accessibility and timeliness of sources, and him or her holding little less preference in already familiar sources. The majority of information barriers experienced by SF&F writers are environmental barriers, especially money-related ones. This study showed that there are patterns of behaviour among SF&F writers that, when researched further, enable a more holistic view on the general human information seeking. Understanding the different preferences in creative writers’ information seeking in the three work roles will also make the development of more effective and targeted information products and services possible, especially at those academic libraries serving student patrons in the growing number of higher education creative writing programsTämän pro gradu -tutkielman aihe on tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittajien tiedonhankintakäyttäytyminen. Aiempi taiteilijoita koskeva tiedonhankintakäyttäytymisen tutkimus on ollut vähäistä ja luovia kirjoittajia koskeva tutkimus lähes olematonta. Tutkielman metodi on verkkolomakkeella toteutettu kyselytutkimus, jonka painopisteet ovat Likert-asteikollisissa kysymyksissä ja epäparametrisessa tilastollisessa analyysissä. Tutkimuskysymykset ovat seuraavat: 1) Mitkä ovat tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittajien käyttämät tiedonlähteet ja -kanavat kolmessa tämän tutkimuksen ehdottamassa työroolissa: tutkijarooli, artesaanirooli ja yrittäjärooli? 2) Mitkä tiedonlähteiden piirteet ovat kirjoittajien mielestä tärkeimmät? 3) Miten kirjoittajien genre, kokemus, rahalliseen ansioon yltäminen ja sukupuoli vaikuttavat tiedonlähteiden valintaan? 4) Mitä tiedonhankinnan esteitä kirjoittajat kohtaavat? Kyselylomake lähetettiin 16 englanninkieliselle tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittamisen foorumille, ja se keräsi 130 vastaajaa yhdeksältä foorumilta. Tuloksista kävi ilmi, että tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittajien tiedonhankintakäyttäytymistä luonnehtii hakukoneiden, interpersoonallisten lähteiden ja ”itsen” käyttö tiedonlähteenä. Tutkijaroolissa arvoa annetaan myös tietokannoille ja -sanakirjoille verkossa, fiktiiviselle ja tietokirjallisuudelle sekä luonnolle ja ympäristölle. Artesaaniroolin tiedonhankintaa ei hallitse mitkään tietyt lähteet, joskin lähteiden hankinta saattaa olla yleistä. Yrittäjäroolin tiedonhankinta on luonteeltaan interpersoonallisempaa kuin muiden. Tärkein tiedonlähteen piirre tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittajille on luotettavuus. Tieteiskirjoittajat ovat fantasiakirjoittajia aktiivisempia verkkouutispalvelujen käyttäjiä tutkijaroolissa. Kirjoittamiskokemuksen kertyminen on liitoksissa yleisten kirjastojen, arkistojen ja museoiden käytön lisääntymiseen. Aloittelevat kirjoittajat käyttävät muita ryhmiä vähemmän hyväkseen asiantuntijoita ja tutkijoita. He joilla on 6–10 vuotta kirjoittajakokemusta saattavat olla urallaan vaiheessa, jossa kirjoittajauraan liittyvä tiedonhankinta on yleistä verkon tietokannoista, tietosanakirjoista, medianjakopalveluista ja uutispalveluista. Naispuoliset kirjoittajat hyödyntävät miehiä aktiivisemmin muiden ihmisten kokemuksia tutkijaroolissa ja joitakin kirjoittamaan oppimisen kanavia artesaani- ja yrittäjäroolissa. Rahalliseen ansioon yltäminen korreloi hiukan korkeamman tiedonlähteiden huonon tavoitettavuuden ja myöhäisyyden sietokyvyn kanssa sekä jo entuudestaan tuttujen lähteiden hiukan vähemmän suosimisen kanssa. Tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittajien yleisimmät tiedonhankinnan esteet ovat ympäristöön ja erityisesti rahaan liittyvät esteet. Tutkielma osoitti, että tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittajien tiedonhankintaan liittyy piirteitä, joita syvemmin tutkimalla voidaan päästä entistä kokonaisvaltaisempaan käsitykseen ihmisen tiedonhankinnasta. Ymmärtämällä luovien kirjoittajien tiedonhankintaa erilaisissa työrooleissa on myös mahdollista kehittää entistä parempia heille räätälöityjä informaatiopalveluja ja -tuotteita. Tämä pätee erityisesti niihin korkeakoulukirjastoihin, jotka palvelevat kansainvälisesti koko ajan kasvavaa joukkoa luovan kirjoittamisen opiskelulinjoissa olevia
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Cupitt, Catherine Anne. „Space opera: a hybrid form of science fiction and fantasy“. Thesis, Curtin University, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/1082.
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This thesis considers space opera as a hybrid form of science fiction and fantasy.“Falling Stars,” the creative component which includes fantasy, space opera and science fiction stories, constitutes a spectrum of speculative fiction. In order to illustrate the similarities and difference between the genres represented in the spectrum, I focus on the central figure of the alien other and the ways in which such a figure can be gendered and embodied. The space opera novella combines motifs of both fantasy and science fiction within the figure of the cyborg, Orlando, who is transgendered and hyperchangeably embodied.The exegesis offers a theoretical context through which to view the creative work. I argue that space operas are melodramatic adventure stories, which operate as a hybrid form of science fiction and fantasy, using the non-realist expectations inherent in both, but mixing the extrapolations and icons of science fiction with the self-consistent but unbelievable discontinuities of fantasy. I also consider space opera’s tendency to exhibit a conservative, unexamined colonialistic imperative, with the attendant assumptions that create a potential for feminist subversion.
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Lewis, Barry. „Language disorder in postmodernist American fiction“. Thesis, University of Sunderland, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.332329.
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Moran, Alexander James Paul. „Cultural reproduction in contemporary American fiction“. Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7683/.
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This thesis traces the ways in which David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead react against the historical, institutional, and formal limits imposed upon contemporary fiction and culture. It argues that in order to counteract such constraints, they embrace and co-opt older forms and values as enabling for their fiction. To map these processes and relationships, I read these five writers as engaging with and reflective of the concept of cultural reproduction. Building largely from Raymond Williams’s definitions, the lens of cultural reproduction acknowledges what Williams terms the ‘limits and pressures’ of the contemporary – such as the inheritance of postmodernism, creative writing programs, technological changes, and commercial demands – but also how these writers display agency in reaction to such limits. Chapter One uses pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s theories of habit to suggest Wallace’s work explores the way culture is reproduced habitually. Chapter Two contends that Franzen’s attention to these processes is distinctly melodramatic, and his writing embodies melodrama, rather than his stated realism. Chapter Three examines Chabon, Egan, and Whitehead as representative of the ‘genrefication’ of contemporary American fiction, and how each embrace genre forms to respond to different elements and processes of cultural reproduction.
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Walsh, Richard. „Novel arguments : reading innovative American fiction /“. Cambridge (GB) : Cambridge university press, 1995. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb369680734.
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Marshall, Katie Elizabeth. „Corridor media architectures in American fiction /“. Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1932209641&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Westlake, David Michael. „Fantasy and Imagination: Discovering the Threshold of Meaning“. Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2005. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/WestlakeDM2005.pdf.
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Elliott, Mary Jane. „Transmigratory subjectivity in contemporary latina fiction /“. Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9315.
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Collins, Martha Anne. „Homelessness in Abraham Cahan's Fiction“. W&M ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625820.
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Chen, Jou-An. „An exploration of nature and human development in young adult historical fantasy“. Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/282878.
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Traditional historical writing focuses on the cause and effect of human action, assuming that it is the historian's responsibility to recount the ebbs and flows of human progress. In the process of laying hold of the past as a narrative of human action, historical writing has developed the tendency to marginalise nature and undermine its power to influence the historical narrative. My investigation explores the fantastic in historical fantasy as a means of resisting historical writing's anthropocentrism. Historical fantasy uses fantastical elements to create counterfactual and alternative historical realities that have the potential to resist and undermine history's anthropocentric norm. My thesis examines four contemporary young adult historical fantasy trilogies that reimagine key turning points in history such as industrialisation, the American frontier, European imperialism, and World War I. They share the theme of retrieving and subverting anthropocentric discourses in the history of human development and thereby creating space for nature's presence and agency. My study finds that the fantastic is an effective means of subverting historical writing's anthropocentrism. But it also uncovers ambiguities and contradictions in historical fantasy's ecological revisionism, pointing to the idea that despite the fantastic's capacity for subversion, historical representations of nature cannot be separated from considerations of human identity and survival.
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Brennan, Joseph Carl Linden. „I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy: new approaches to slash fiction“. Thesis, Department of Media and Communications, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5872.
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This thesis uses slash fan fiction produced for the CW television series Supernatural to suggest two new slash typologies. While existing frameworks — romantopia (concerned with sex) and intimatopia (concerned with intimacy) — are useful, I argue that many slash stories fall outside the scope of these two terms into two newly proposed categories: paratopia and monstropia. Paratopic slash is centrally concerned with psychological change or geographical repositioning and realises, like romantopia and intimatopia, potentials of homosocial desire. Monstropic slash is centrally concerned with perversity and realises potentials of homosexual panic; it is a genre of slash fiction until now unexplored by slash scholarship. To illustrate these frameworks I discuss Supernatural slash stories in detail. Supernatural was chosen to illustrate both paratopia and monstropia because it is arguably a text that promotes homosexual panic as much as it does homosocial desire. I also argue that Supernatural slash, which would ordinarily be classified as romantopic or intimatopic, is paratopic due to the changes necessary to negotiate the characters’ homophobia and authentically present them in either sexual or intimate love. In conclusion, I argue that paratopia and monstropia are useful frameworks for understanding the ‘other worlds’ that slash inhabits — worlds beyond the reach of ‘topias’ romantopia and intimatopia.
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Kawakami, Chiyoko. „The hybrid narrative world of Izumi Kyōka /“. Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/6670.
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Bowman, Travis E. „Crossroads and Crow Feathers“. ScholarWorks@UNO, 2019. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2591.
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This thesis uses the short story form to examine the influence of myth, magick, and the supernatural on the interstitial areas of the United States. The power of words as a force for change figures prominently in these stories. This thesis looks at the monstrous as it moves in the darkness and in the minds of humans, but also at the tremendous depths of compassion and courage we find in ourselves when faced with monstrous situations.
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Dorling, Alan. „Experimental forms in contemporary fiction“. Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1985. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13310/.
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Concerned with developments in contemporary innovative fiction Experimental Forms in Contemporary Fiction locates 'post- Modernist' writing largely within a North American context. William Burroughs, Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover and Steve Katz are identified as the exemplary post-Modernist figures; their favoured techniques --a combination of cancellation and erasure, fragmentation and discontinuity, game and play--express an indeterminancy of meaning which places post-Modernist writing at some distance from the writing of contemporary figures like Vladimir Nabokov, John Hawkes and John Barth, who, as identifiably 'neo- Modernists', are essentially concerned with extending Modernism's restorative and paralleling features into the contemporary literary discourse. At the same time, post- Modernist fiction bears only a passing resemblence to the work of innovative contemporary British writers like B. S. Johnson, Gabriel Josipovici and J. G. Ballard, who are inclined to impose a series of disruptive forms upon mimetic substance. Uniquely post-Modernist fiction celebrates an eternity of displacement by insisting that unity, coherence and system are totalitarian concepts inimicable to the necessary free- lay of the imagination. Therefore, even as Burroughs et al express long-standing American literary concerns, post- Modernist fiction is demonstrably part of the deconstructive shift away from holistic and humanistic ideas and procedures. Post-Modernist writing, therefore, initiates a crisis within literary criticism, one which needs to be examined against the background of contemporary philosophical, cultural, and social developments.
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Ersoy, Gozde. „Trajectories, thresholds, transformations : coming of age in classic modern fantasy fiction“. Thesis, Brunel University, 2016. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/13606.
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This thesis examines and explores the process of coming of age in successful fantasy fiction series, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novel and its prequel The Hobbit, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. In particular, it is suggested that the huge popularity of fantasy stems from the fact that it provides a representation of human agency significantly at odds with the everyday experience of an increasingly bureaucratized and financially-determined world. Analysis shows how fantasy texts provide a universal model that help younger readers to understand the process of maturity as individuation and entry into the intersubjective social world. The central protagonists of such texts have to learn to master concepts such as seeing oneself in the other through intersubjective dialogues, objectifying one’s self in the world, and coping with their own battles, in the process of finding their way to maturity. This fictional “quest” or “journey” provides a model for readers to assess their own realities and actions, which in turn has the effect of changing their understanding and enabling them to critique their own lives. It is demonstrated how these classic and widely translated works of fantastic literature, which reach a huge crossover readership, may be understood in terms of parallel transformational stages such as confusion, inattentional blindness, fear, courage and various attempts of learning the need for moderation. Overall, this analysis, comprising the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, education, behavioural economics, sociology, media, and history, explores the processes of transformation and maturation within fantasy literature. At the same time, the case for fantasy literature’s uniqueness in its capacity to reveal the mechanisms of human agency is substantiated within a theoretical framework.
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Meyer, Lois A. „Accomplishing shared meaning(s) through group talk : fact, fiction, fantasy or...? /“. The Ohio State University, 1991. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487687485809177.
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Hort, Harold 1920. „Fact and fiction, form and fantasy : the novels of Elizabeth Jolley“. Thesis, Department of English, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5430.
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Oxoby, Marc C. „American literary fiction in a televisual age /“. abstract and full text PDF (free order & download UNR users only), 2005. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/dissertations/fullcit/3209131.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005."August, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-227). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2005]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.
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Sutton, Malcolm. „Ontologies of Community in Postmodernist American Fiction“. Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20695.
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Using a number of structurally innovative novels from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as a basis for study, this dissertation examines the representation of communities in postmodernist American fiction. While novels have often been critically studied from the standpoint of the individual and society, here the often neglected category of community is put under scrutiny. Yet rather than considering it from a sociological point of view, which can potentially favour historical, economic or political grounds for community, this study focuses on the ontological binds formed between individual and community. On one level this study connects formal qualities of postmodernist novels to a representation of community – especially literary conventions from the past that are foregrounded in the present texts. On another level it interrogates the limits of the individual in relation to others – how we emerge from others, how we are discrete from others, how much we can actually share with others, at what cost we stay or break with the others who have most influenced us. The primary novels studied here, each of which is deeply invested in the community as a locus for ontological interrogation, are Robert Coover’s "Gerald’s Party" (1985) and "John’s Wife" (1996), Gilbert Sorrentino’s "Crystal Vision" (1981) and "Odd Number" (1985), Harry Mathews’s "Cigarettes" (1987), Joseph McElroy’s "Women and Men" (1987), and Toni Morrison’s "Paradise" (1997). Despite their varied representations of and attitudes toward the individual in community, these texts share a common spectre of American Romanticism that inflects how we read the possibility of community in the postmodernist period.
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McGimpsey, David. „Called shots, baseball as modern American fiction“. Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq24753.pdf.
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Strecker, Geralyn. „Reading prostitution in American fiction, 1893-1917“. Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1213148.
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Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts.Department of English
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Sanchez, Maria Ruth Noriega. „Magic realism in contemporary American women's fiction“. Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2001. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3502/.
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The aim of the study is to illustrate the importance of magic realism in American women's fiction in the late twentieth century. The term magic realism, which has traditionally been associated with Latin American men's writing, has been known by different, and often contradictory, definitions. It may be argued that, properly defined, it can be a valid term to describe a number of characteristics common to a corpus of work, and can be considered as an aesthetic category different from others such as Surrealism or Fantastic literature, with which it has often been compared. Furthermore, magic realism has viability as a contemporary international mode and is particularly suitable to women writers from minority ethnic groups. The present study intends to draw relevant comparative analyses of uses of magic realism that show various formal and thematic interactions between separate literary traditions. The introduction offers an overview of the different conceptions and applications of the term since its origins within the area of painting, and suggests a working definition that can be effective for intensive textual analysis of several novels. In order to offer a new approach which can enable us to move away the paradigm of magic realism from Latin America towards a more multicultural framework, the focus will be on three geographical-cultural areas: African American, Native American and Chicano/Mexican writing. The implementation of magic realist strategies in African American writing will be examined in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), with a particular emphasis on the significance of African mythical background and the experience of dispossession and transference of culture. Magic realist elements in the novels Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich and Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko will be studied in the context of Native American oral tradition and cosmologies. The practice of magic realism on both sides of the U. S. - Mexico border will be explored in the novels So Far from God (1993), by the Chicana Ana Castillo, and Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by the Mexican Laura Esquivel. A description of the borderland culture in the American Southwest, as well as comparisons between North and Latin American uses of magic realism will be provided. Finally, some connections amongst the discussed literary traditions and further lines of research will be suggested.
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Macpherson, Heidi Rae Slettedahl. „Escape in recent North American women's fiction“. Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.481473.
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Gillan, Lindsey. „Encountering theory : readings in contemporary American fiction“. Thesis, University of Sussex, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.285082.
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This thesis gathers four American fiction writers from the group labelled as blank fiction writers during the 1980s - Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Joel Rose and Catherine Texier - to suggest that their work does more than represent the flat, stunned prose attributed to blank fiction. Rather, their simple, streetwise yet often lyrical language is politically engaged, debating profound questions about the nature of identity, both of the indi vidual and of the text. The writing, while superficially transparent, is illusory, reflecting the belief that meaning is contextual: this has wide-reaching implications for textuality since the borders of meaning and of the text are contested. While the differences in form and style of these writers are evident, their focus upon the links between language, memory and identity within particular historico-cultural contexts show that they all have interests in the politics of language. The characterisation and narratives of their texts are infused with a degree of self-reflexivity that demonstrates a recognition of their own instability and their contingency upon contexts beyond as well as within the textual borders. By focusing upon the limitations of language to discuss or express identity and memory in concrete terms, these writers ask philosophical and political questions that arguably stand apart from the amoral prose of other writers of blank fiction such as Brett Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper. Their texts address issues of identity regarding gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and poverty while emphasizing that they cannot be divorced from purely philosophical questions about the nature of being and its relationship to language. Yet these writers move beyond postmodern debates about textuali ty to explore the limits of fiction within the wider cultural contexts of writing at the end of the twentieth century.
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Sacks, Michelle Tamara. „Apocalypse and elegy in contemporary american fiction“. Thesis, University of Cape Town, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6724.
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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.
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Stoecklein, Mary, und Mary Stoecklein. „Native American Mystery, Crime, and Detective Fiction“. Diss., The University of Arizona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/624574.
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Native American Mystery, Crime, and Detective Fiction examines a range of texts, most of them Native-authored, that utilize elements of a popular and accessible literary genre: the mystery, crime, and detective story. The examined texts convey how writers fuse tribally-specific cultural elements with characteristics of mystery, crime, and detective fiction as a way to, as I argue, inform all readers about Native American histories, cultures, and contemporary issues. Exploring how Native American writers approach the genre of mystery, crime, and detective fiction is critical, since it is a sub-genre of American Indian literature that has, to date, received little scholarly attention.
This study considers eight novels and two made for TV movies that are either written by Native American writers, feature Native American characters and settings, or both. The novels and films that are analyzed represent a spectrum of mystery, crime, and detective stories: starting with the historical mysteries about the Osage Oil Murders presented by Linda Hogan and Tom Holm; to the calls to action regarding contemporary issues of justice, jurisdiction, and violence against American Indian women offered by Frances Washburn and Louise Erdrich; to the short series that invoke intricate questions about history and identity created by Louis Owens; and, finally, to Tony Hillerman's immensely popular hard-boiled Navajo tribal policemen who are brought to the small screen by Chris Eyre, where the distinctions between Western and Indigenous conceptions of healing and spiritual belief are highlighted. These novels and films illustrate a range of American Indian mystery, crime, and detective fiction, and my analysis illuminates the ways in which these texts work to inform and transform readers in regard to issues that surround crime and justice within American Indian contexts.
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Rhee, Michelle Young-Mee. „Slant in Asian American poetry and fiction /“. May be available electronically:, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/login?COPT=REJTPTU1MTUmSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=12498.
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Hallissy, Margaret. „Reading Irish-American fiction : the hyphenated self /“. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb401445882.
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Shishkin, Timur. „Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction“. PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
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The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the selected stories show that all the conflicts in them, in one way or another, repeat similar patterns and lead to the same root of the problem of misunderstanding, which is fear. To be more precise, all the cases of hate towards "different" characters can be explained by the hater's explicit or implicit fear of death in its various forms: inability to procreate one's own kind, cultural or personal self-identity loss, actual life threat in the form of a reminder of possible physical harm and death. Most often it would be the case where shame and fear of death overlap in a very complex way. In general, the cases of characters' otherness fall into three major groups. The nature of the alienation for each of these groups is described and analyzed in three separate chapters. Prejudice and stereotypes are playing a great role in formation of fears and insecurities which need to be dismantled in order to make peaceful coexistence possible. This work concludes with pointing out the crucial role of taking an approach of representation of various perspectives and diversification of voices in creative writing, academia and media in the context of multicultural society.
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Conaway, Sean Reed. „The New American Book of James“. Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/77481.
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The New American Book of James, told through the comic first-person perspective of Dickie James, explores a world where the mythic elements of Christianity become hyperbolically realized as an extension of Dickie’s tormented psyche. As he grows larger, hungrier, and more desperate, his sins never fail to evoke Old Testament retribution while he both seeks and dreads New Covenant redemption. His downward spiral coincides with his father’s, Pastor Daniel James, who’s certain he knows how all stories end.
Set in the swampy Tidewater region of Virginia, the book opens when Dickie, at the age of eight, experiences a vivid night terror and claims it was a demon. His father clumsily attempts an exorcism, traumatizing his son and robbing him of sleep. Daniel, believing he’s cast out a demon, grows increasingly fanatical, and as Dickie ages his doubts not just about Christianity but also his father deepen, even as he convinces himself that he is the cause of the plague-like disasters wreaking havoc on his town.
The New American Book of James encompasses seven years and features characters haunted by demons: Dickie’s ferocious best friend, Rodney; Dickie’s mother, Maggie, whose religious attachment to her kitchen counterbalances the faith of her husband; and middle-aged seductress Ms. Miller, drawn to Dickie’s mannish size and guileless nature. Dickie wrestles with the analogous influences of faith and despair, spirit and flesh, and explores how, in a world where sin and righteousness are many shades of gray, reality itself is (re)constructed through orthodoxy, belief, and fear.Master of Fine Arts