Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'City and town life – Oregon – Fiction'

A Year in the City is a mosaic novel set in contemporary an historical Sydney. It is 70, 000 words long, and contains twelve different narratives, with the American author Mark Twain appearing as a fictional character in the opening and closing. A Year in the City seeks to represent the fragmented, multicultural nature of Sydney through a diverse range of narrators and styles. Each of the chapters is linked through the themes of belonging, race, land ownership. The Sydney portrayed in the novel is what Leonie Sandercock called a Mongrel City, a metaphor used to characterise the "new urban condition in which difference, otherness, fragmentation, splintering, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity, [and] plurality prevail." A Year in the City intends to celebrate cultural and racial heterogeneity. It is accompanied by a research dissertation of 30, 000 words, that investigates the project of writing about the city and the theme of race. It explores the imagined city through the work of James Donald and Ross Gibson, and addresses the challenge of capturing the lived experience in text, as theorised by Henri Lefebvre. The mosaic structure of A Year in the City borrows from Michel de Certeau's theory of walking the city and Walter Benjamin's flaneur. The issue of race is discussed in relation to the representation of white and non-white characters against the dominant white society.

The dissertation attempted to study the urban fiction of Chi Li (1957- ) through a detail analysis of her texts. Being one of the leaders of Chinese New Realism, Chi Li always tried to write about the real life and living conditions of urban people, which actually expressed her understanding and interpretation of city. This thesis would like to discuss the images of cities in Chi Li’s writings, her feelings on urbanization, and also try to evaluate her contribution to the evolution of contemporary Chinese urban fiction. The thesis consisted of five chapters. Chapter one clarified the basic concepts of urban literature and reviewed the development of Chinese urban fiction. Besides, previous research works on Chi Li were briefly introduced. The second chapter studied the urban-rural relations in Chi Li’s textual depiction. City and countryside, bearing two different characteristics of social life and culture, had met and influenced each other in a large scale twice after The thesis consisted of five chapters. Chapter one clarified the basic concepts of urban literature and reviewed the development of Chinese urban fiction. Besides, previous research works on Chi Li were briefly introduced. The second chapter studied the urban-rural relations in Chi Li’s textual depiction. City and countryside, bearing two different characteristics of social life and culture, had met and influenced each other in a large scale twice after
published_or_final_version
Chinese
Master
Master of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009.
Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-200). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

In the following nine linked stories, characters from disparate backgrounds and socio-economic strata converge in a rural community along the Missouri river in central Montana. A Texas-based oil exploration and production company takes up residence in the area, causing a stir in the neighborhood. Long-time local residents experience their daily lives amid a tourist driven economy and reaffirm their aspirations to leave despite significant obstacles and limitations. In "Show Me the Way to Go Home," a young waitress is stranded after a car accident and seeks help from residents living on the single row of houses in the area. In "Give Death Grace," a resident artist leaves to resolve her tumultuous past with her father. In "A Good Little Fisherwoman," a woman deals with the repercussions of her recent reproductive decisions during a fishing trip. In "Little Fires," a local man deals with the tragic burn injury of a child while also facing deeply rooted resentments with his mother. In "Dwelling," an aging local must decide whether or not she will sell her home to two strangers. In "Other Important Areas of Functioning," a woman decides to discontinue her mood stabilizing medications in favor of a more natural lifestyle. While this place means something different to each of these characters, they all coexist while facing individual challenges.

This Ph.D. dissertation examines the influence of Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long's novel No Mean City (1935) on the representation of working-class subjectivity in modem Scottish urban fiction. The novel helped to focus literary attention on a predominantly male, working-class, urban and realistic vision of modern Scotland. McArthur and Long explore - in their representations of destructive slum-dwelling characters - the damaging effects of class and gender on working-class identity. The controversy surrounding the book has always been intense, and most critics either deplore or downplay the full significance of No Mean City's literary impact. My dissertation re-examines one of the most disliked and misrepresented working-class novels in modern Scottish literary history. McArthur and Long's literary legacy, notwithstanding its many detractors, has become something to write against. Through examination of works by James Barke, John McNeillie, Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, Bill McGhee, George Friel, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, Meg Henderson and A.L. Kennedy, the thesis outlines how the challenge represented by No Mean City has survived the decades following its publication. It argues that contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the novel's influence has been instrumental, not detrimental, to the evolution of modern Scottish literature. Ultimately I hope to pave the way toward a fuller, more nuanced understanding of No Mean City's remarkable impact, and to demonstrate how pervasive its legacy has been to Scottish writers from the 1930s to the 1990s.

The thesis examines some of the short and long fiction set in Johannesburg, which is published between approximately 1980 and 2003. The thesis examines how the residents viewed themselves, and evaluates the various social and political struggles and strategies that were employed in an attempt to belong, imagine the city differently and establish strategic identities that would enable them to live a better life during the focused quarter of a century of experiences in an ever-changing fictive Johannesburg.
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

The dissertation focuses on the mapping of the southern African urban spaces and how it is linked to the urban dwellers' constitution of their identities, agency and subversion of the obtaining bleak and hegemonic conditions as represented in current fiction set in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Chapter 1 of the dissertation gives an overview of the social and historical developments characterising the construction of the southern African city from the colonial up to the current global city. The subordinate and marginal identities inscribed upon the Southern Africans as well as early forms of agency and subversion of the Western social, political and economic hegemony that has defined the city through out history will be looked at. Michael de Certeau's (1993) ideas showing the hegemonic Western socio-economic agenda's creation of ordinary urban dwellers' invisibility and fragmentation, which they later subvert by renaming and remapping the alienating urban spaces of New York to improve their own lives, will be taken into consideration in this chapter's definition of the construction of the city and urban identities. In Chapter 2, the representation of the southern African urban spaces' cartography in the fiction is discussed. The characteristic spaces ranging from the socially and morally decayed inner-city, the well-built postmodern and elite Central Business District, the affluent low-density suburbs and the far-away impoverished highdensity suburbs will be explored. The discussion attempts a complex unpacking of linkages between the mapping of Harare and Johannesburg with the hegemonic western social and economic agenda as well as the current urban dwellers' state of individual and psychological fragmentation. Chapter 3 examines the way in which the current southern African urban social dislocation is represented in the fiction. The complexity of the urban dislocation signified by the prevalence of violence, xenophobia and HIV/AIDS is discussed. There is also a dialectical analysis ofhow the depicted urban dislocation is located within the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, the western global cultural and economic influence as well as individual effort and decision-making in the chapter. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which gendered urban spaces are portrayed in the fiction. The subordination of primarily women, as well as the weak and dependent irrespective of gender is discussed. The resultant anxieties, alienation, marginalisation of women and the subservient are viewed from the traditional and colonial patriarchy's construction of the city as a predominantly masculine space excluding women. The western global cultural and economic hegemony's creation of a new gendered ideology characterised by the exclusion and feminisation of the poor, invisible and dependent is also discussed in this chapter. Nevertheless, the chapter ends with a discussion of the existing possibilities of female empowerment notably inscribed in the city's open education system, informal trade space as well as the provision of a social space encouraging pragmatic female decision-making especially in relation to HIV and AIDS. Finally the dissertation's concluding note is based on an evaluation of the postcolonial condition of southern Africa in relation to the mapping of the urban spaces and various identities represented in the fiction. An attempt is also made to place the research within the problematic of whether the mapping is based on postcolonialism or postmodernism. The objective here is to offer the importance of a cross-reading between the two as enabling a more meaningful conception of the region's current urban space.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

陳芃欣.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-133).
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Abstract in Chinese and English.
Chen Pengxin.