To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: English fiction 20th century History and criticism.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English fiction 20th century History and criticism'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'English fiction 20th century History and criticism.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Chan, Wing-chun Julia, and 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.
Full text
2
Sabatini, Sandra. "Making babies, representations of the infant in 20th century Canadian fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ60564.pdf.
Full text
3
Masters, Benjamin Scott. "The ethics of excess : style and morality in British fiction since the 1960s." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648740.
Full text
4
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.
Full text
5
Blatchford, Mathew. "The old New Wave : a study of the 'New Wave' in British science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s, with special reference to the works of Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Harry Harrison and Michael Moorcock." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22150.
Full textAbstract:
Bibliography: pages 174-184.This thesis examines the 'New Wave' in British science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s. The use of the terms 'science fiction' and 'New Wave' in the thesis are defined through a use of elements of the ideological theories of Louis Althusser. The New Wave is seen as a change in the ideological framework of the science fiction establishment. For oonvenience, the progress of the New Wave is divided into three stages, each covered by a chapter. Works by the four most prominent writers in the movement are discussed.
6
Abu-Manneh, Bashir. "Fiction of the New statesman, 1913-1939." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2002. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2444f4a-ee6b-4063-afbf-26348bd22356.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is the first systematic study of short stories published in the New Statesman [NS] weekly magazine from its foundation in 1913 to 1939. The main question it seeks to address is what type of fiction did a mainstream socialist publication like the NS publish then? By chronologically charting dominant literary figures and themes, the thesis aims to discern significant cultural tendencies and editorial principles of selection. Following Raymond Williams' 'cultural materialism', fiction is read in its relation to social history, as a 'representation of history'. Chapter 1 deals with the foundation of the journal and its first year of publication, mapping out the contradictions between Fabian collectivist ideology and ethical socialism, urban realism and literary Georgianism, country and city. A focus on urban problems of poverty unemployment, philanthropy, and machinofacture is at the heart of the NS's literary concern, in 1913. Chapter 2 focuses on stories published during World War I, and goes up to 1926. It argues that the reality of the War was falsified as a time of rest and relaxation, in line with the journal's political policy of supporting the war effort. The immediate post-war period is read as a time of disappointment and intensified social conflict and struggle. The General Strike of 1926 is a turning point in interwar history. It also ushers in a period of unprecedented cultural activity in the NS. As Chapters 4 and 5 show, the post-Strike period is characterised by the consolidation of the working-class fiction of socialist R. M. Fox; by the rise of the countryside realism of H. E. Bates; and by the rise of the colonial fiction of E. R. Morrough on Egypt (which is examined in the context of Leslie Mitchell's, E. M. Forster's, and William Plomer's responses to empire). Significant contributions by women writers (such as Faith Compton Mackenzie) about travel, duty, and oppression are also made in the late 20s, early 30s. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the magnificent place that Russian fiction occupies in the 30s through the work of Michael Zoshchenko. Though written during the free and experimental 20s, his satiric fiction is published as a sample of Soviet literature of the 30s, thus consolidating the Stalinist line dictated by the political editor, Kingsley Martin, that 'self-criticism' is a central part of Soviet politics and society. Chapter 7 is a tribute to the NS's contribution to reconstructing British realism away from both Victorian moralism and European naturalism. The stories of Bates, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Chamberlain are dominant, conveying different ways of negotiating the pressures of documentary realism and the political developments of the 30s. Also discussed is the unique modernist contribution of neglected Stella Benson, which presents a strong challenge to the usual representationalism of NS fiction. The concluding chapter reads NS fiction in the whole period between 1913 and 1939 as the cultural expression of the new petty bourgeoisie, especially its progressive, politically and socially engaged side. With its focus on ordinariness and lived experience, and its formal experimentation and innovation, NS fiction exemplifies artistic commitment par excellence, a conscious cultural alignment with the actuality and potentiality of the new petty bourgeoisie.
7
Hill, Colin. "The modern-realist movement in English-Canadian fiction, 1919-1950." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19471.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.
8
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
9
Brazil, Kevin. "The work of art in postwar fiction, 1945-2001." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f8102451-09cf-4f92-8e6e-e7c1ced2641c.
Full textAbstract:
'The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001' explores the responses of postwar novelists to visual art by focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger and W.G. Sebald. In doing so, it opens up a new approach to understanding the relationship between fiction and art in the postwar period as a whole, for what distinguishes these writers is that they use an engagement with visual art in order to historicize their own work as distinctly 'postwar' fiction. This thesis shows that in the writings of these novelists, long running aesthetic issues in the study of the relationship between text and image are reformulated and transformed: medium specificity; ekphrasis; and visual representation as a model for literary realism. Drawing throughout on original archival research, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 traces what T.J. Clark terms the 'processes of conversion and relation' between art, its contexts and its commentators, and it is by studying these mediations that the literary consequences of the work of art for these writers are shown. With a historicizing approach throughout, and an interest in the ways in which postwar novelists mediate their engagement with art through history, this thesis contributes to a new understanding of the literature and art of the postwar era, or what Amy Hungerford has called 'the period formerly known as contemporary'. This thesis offers a revisionary account of a relationship previously subsumed under the dominant logic of postmodernism, which according to Fredric Jameson was defined by a 'waning of historicity'. In returning historicity as method and theme to the study of the relationship between literature and art since 1945, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 shows the diverse ways in which postwar writers historicized their writing, and reflected on their techniques, in dialogue with visual art. Concerning itself with the distinct challenges posed by focusing on what Hannah Ardent called the 'most recent' past, this thesis also develops new ways of thinking more broadly about the relationships between literature, art and history. Chapter 1, 'Reviewing Postwar Fiction', situates this thesis within recent debates in literary studies surrounding what Mark McGurl has termed a discipline-wide 'hegemony of history'. Chapter 2, on Samuel Beckett, argues that Beckett's postwar art criticism responds to a specific strand of Marxist humanist aesthetics developed after the war, and it studies Beckett's manuscripts to show the relationship between this criticism and the composition of The Unnamable. Chapter 3 discusses William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions, arguing that the novel pivots around some of the central cruxes of postwar American aesthetic debate: Clement Greenberg's theory of abstraction, and Michael Fried's identification of the problem of 'art and objecthood'. Chapter 4 discusses the work of the British art critic and novelist, John Berger. It shows that Berger's critical account of Cubism shaped the narrative forms of his novels A Painter of Our Time and G., and that these narrative innovations were central to his theory of the artistic and revolutionary 'moment'. Chapter 5 focuses on the relationship between photography, painting and aesthetics in the work of W. G. Sebald. It argues that aesthetic concepts such as 'the readymade' and 'objective chance' offer a better account of Sebald's engagement with art than accounts which draw on trauma theory. The thesis concludes with a short discussion of how the writers studied in this thesis have influenced the contemporary fiction of Jonathan Franzen, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy.
10
Hill, Geoffrey Burt. "'A breeding-ground of authors' : South East Asia in British fiction, 1945-1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708370.
Full text
11
Gossage, Ann. "Between the lines : the representation of Canadian women in English-language novels written by women in the 1930s." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=24085.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the role of Canadian women as presented in English language novels of the 1930s written by women authors. Within the context of the Great Depression it focuses on issues that are central to women's daily lives such as work, love, marriage and motherhood. It also isolates recurring themes in the novels and attempts to understand the authors' messages within their social context. Social reform, politics and gender relationships are among the subjects explored.
12
LeStage, Gregory. "Forces in the development of the British short story, 1930-1970 : some writers, editors, and periodicals." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670227.
Full text
13
Eckstein, Simon J. "The shadow of the past : fantasy, modernism, and the aftermath of a world at war." Thesis, Swansea University, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678625.
Full textAbstract:
This study constitutes a single strand of a wider argument for a thorough-going reassessment of the place of fantasy literature within the canon. In particular, it aims to redress a marked lack of critical attention paid to the distinct movement towards fantastic modes of representation in the mid-twentieth century.
14
Myers, Tony. "Postmodernism and historicity : narrative forms in the contemporary novel." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1809.
Full textAbstract:
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.
15
Trainin, Sarah Jean. "The rise of mass culture theory and its effect on golden age detective fiction." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2002. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2255.
Full text
16
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
17
Kaplan, Stacey Meredith 1973. "The modern(ist) short form: Containing class in early 20th century literature and film." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10574.
Full textAbstract:
ix, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.My dissertation analyzes the overlooked short works of authors and auteurs who do not fit comfortably into the conventional category of modernism due to their subtly experimental aesthetics: the versatile British author Vita Sackville-West, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen, and the British emigrant filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. I focus on the years 1920-1923 to gain an alternative understanding of modernism's annus mirabulus and the years immediately preceding and following it. My first chapter studies the most critically disregarded author of the project: Sackville-West. Her 1922 volume of short stories The Heir: A Love Story deserves attention for its examination of social hierarchies. Although her stories ridicule characters regardless of their class background, those who attempt to change their class status, especially when not sanctioned by heredity, are treated with the greatest contempt. The volume, with the reinforcement of the contracted short form, advocates staying within given class boundaries. The second chapter analyzes social structures in Bowen's first book of short stories, Encounters (1922). Like Sackville-West, Bowen's use of the short form complements her interest in how class hierarchies can confine characters. Bowen's portraits of classed encounters and of characters' encounters with class reveal a sense of anxiety over being confined by social status and a sense of displacement over breaking out of class groups, exposing how class divisions accentuate feelings of alienation and instability. The last chapter examines Chaplin's final short films: "The Idle Class" (1921), "Pay Day (1922), and "The Pilgrim" (1923). While placing Chaplin among the modernists complicates the canon in a positive way, it also reduces the complexity of this man and his art. Chaplin is neither a pyrotechnic modernist nor a traditional sentimentalist. Additionally, Chaplin's shorts are neither socially liberal nor conservative. Rather, Chaplin's short films flirt with experimental techniques and progressive class politics, presenting multiple perspectives on the thematic of social hierarchies. But, in the end, his films reinforce rather than overthrow traditional artistic forms and hierarchical ideas. Studying these artists elucidates how the contracted space of the short form produces the perfect room to present a nuanced portrayal of class.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Michael Aronson, Member, English; Mark Quigley, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
18
Collett, Jenna Lara. "'I want to tell the story again': re-telling in selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and Alan Warner." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002291.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis investigates acts of ‘re-telling’ in four selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and Alan Warner.Re-telling, as I have defined it, refers to the re-imagining and re-writing of existing narratives from mythology, fairy tale, and folktale, as well as the re-visioning of scientific discourses and historiography. I argue that this re-telling is representative of a contemporary cultural phenomenon, and is evidence of a postmodern genre that some literary theorists have termed re-visionary fiction. Despite the prevalent re-telling of canonical stories throughout literary history, there is much evidence for the emergence of a specifically contemporary trend of re-visionary literature. Part One of this thesis comprises two chapters which deal with Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Weight (2005) respectively. In these chapters, I argue that, although the feminist and historiographic elements of her work are significant, there exist further motivations for Winterson’s acts of re-telling in both Sexing the Cherry and Weight. In Chapter One, I analyse Winterson’s subversion and re-imagining of historiography, as well as her re-telling of fairy tale, in Sexing the Cherry. Chapter Two provides a discussion of Winterson’s re-telling of the myth of Atlas from Greek mythology, in which she draws on the discourses of science, technology, and autobiography, in Weight. Part Two focuses on Warner’s first two novels, Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997). In both novels, Warner re-imagines aspects of Christian, Celtic and pagan mythology in order to debunk the validity of biblical archetypes and narratives in a contemporary working-class setting, as well as to endow his protagonist with goddess-like or mythical sensibilities. Chapter Three deals predominantly with Warner’s use of language, which I argue is central to his blending of mythological and contemporary content, while Chapter Four analyses his use of myth in these two novels. This thesis argues that while both Winterson and Warner share many of the aims associated with contemporary re-visionary fiction, their novels also exceed the boundaries of the genre in various ways. Winterson and Warner may, therefore, represent a new class of re-visionary writers, whose aim is not solely to subvert the pre-text but to draw on its generic discourses and thematic conventions in order to demonstrate the generic and discursive possibilities inherent in the act of re-telling.
19
Glover, Jayne Ashleigh. ""A complex and delicate web" : a comparative study of selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002241.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.
20
Coll-Vinent, Sílvia. "The reception of English fictional and non-fictional prose in Catalonia (1916-38), with particular reference to Edwardian literary culture and associated debates concerning the novel in England, France and Catalonia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e715592b-063c-4a02-9bbb-d89078ec1719.
Full textAbstract:
The present study opens up the field of Catalan connections with English literature. The importance of Edwardian influences on the general transmission of English authors and works is demonstrated. Original data on the reception of G.K. Chesterton, the Edwardian figure with a most remarkable impact in Catalonia, is brought to light (Chapter 1, Appendix 1), followed by discussion of the presence of H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw and an account of the reception of Well's early fiction (Chapter 2); their influence sheds new light on the aspiration of an élite to modernise Catalan culture. Catalan translations of English fictional works produced in the period 1918-38 (Chapter 3, Appendix II) are linked to the reception of the roman anglais in the context of the crisis of the roman à thèse, and the meditating influence of French criticism is revealed. The values of romance, adventure, and the common man (from Defoe to Stevenson, from Stevenson to Conrad) constitute the recurrent thread associated with the English tradition and with the Edwardian fictional canon, as these were mediated from France to Catalonia. This panorama of transmission enhances an understanding of Catalan views of the novel, in the light of Edwardian values (Chapter 4), as exemplified in Carles Riba's critical appraisal of two Catalan authors, in the appeal of Joseph Conrad's narrative technique and its influence on J.M. de Sagarra, as well as in the comparison of Frank Swinnerton's Nocturne (a best-seller of 1917) and its Catalan counterpart, M. Teresa Vernet's Les algues roges. This thesis also includes a chronology of the reception of Chesterton and a list of Catalan translations of English works of fiction.
21
Chiu, Man-Yin, and 趙敏言. "Written orders: authority and crisis in colonial and postcolonial narratives." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B29812902.
Full text
22
Rine, Abigail. "Words incarnate : contemporary women’s fiction as religious revision." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1961.
Full textAbstract:
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.
23
Wyrill, Beth Alexandra. "The interface of history and fiction in Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the plagues, Ingrid Winterbach’s To hell With Cronjé, and Etienne van Heerden’s The long silence of Mario Salviati." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015517.
Full textAbstract:
Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.
24
Chanda, Geetanjali. "Indian women in the house of fiction : place, gender, and identity in post-independence Indo-English novels by women /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19736617.
Full text
25
Hoffman, Megan. "Women writing women : gender and representation in British 'Golden Age' crime fiction." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11910.
Full textAbstract:
In this thesis, I examine representations of women and gender in British ‘Golden Age' crime fiction by writers including Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. I argue that portrayals of women in these narratives are ambivalent, both advocating a modern, active model of femininity, while also displaying with their resolutions an emphasis on domesticity and on maintaining a heteronormative order, and that this ambivalence provides a means to deal with anxieties about women's place in society. This thesis is divided thematically, beginning with a chapter on historical context which provides an overview of the period's key social tensions. Chapter II explores depictions of women who do not conform to the heteronormative order, such as spinsters, lesbians and ‘fallen' women. Chapter III looks at the ways in which the courtships and marriages of detective couples attempt to negotiate the ideal of companionate marriage and the pressures of a ‘cult of domesticity'. Chapter IV considers the ways in which depictions of women in schools, universities and the workplace are used to explore the tensions between an expanding role in the public sphere and the demand to inhabit traditionally domestic roles. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the image of female victims' and female killers' bodies and the ways in which such depictions can be seen to expose issues of gender, class and identity. Through its examination of a wide variety of texts and writers in the period 1920 to the late 1940s, this thesis investigates the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in Golden Age crime fiction written by women, and argues that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe' solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.
26
Leff, Carol Willa. "Bosman as Verbindingsteken: Hybridities in the Writing of Herman Charles Bosman." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013163.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is concerned with how hybridity is created and interpreted by Herman Charles Bosman in his fiction and non-fiction. Bosman was a gifted writer and raconteur who captured the historical, socio-political context of his time by translating Afrikaans culture for the edification and pleasure of an English readership. Hennie Aucamp summed up this linguistic and cultural translation by pointing out that Bosman was a writer who acted as a “verbindingsteken” or hyphen (65) between Afrikaans and English. His texts contain many voices, and are therefore essentially hybrid. Firstly, by drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, the terms ‘hybridity’, ‘culture’ and ‘identity’, are discussed. Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘hybridity’ is the conceptual lens through which Bosman’s texts are viewed, and aspects of Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural theory also serve the same function. Thereafter, biographies of Bosman are discussed in an effort to understand his hyphenated identity. Following this, specific attention is paid to a selection of Bosman’s essays, short stories, and a novel. Scholarly opinions aid interpretation of levels of hybridity in Bosman’s work. In analysing Bosman’s texts critically, it becomes clear that he believed in a united South Africa that acknowledged and accepted all races. However, analysis also reveals that there are some inconsistencies in Bosman’s personal views, as expressed particularly in his essays. His short stories do not contain the same contradictions. Critical analysis of the novel Willemsdorp attests that cultural hybridity is not always viewed as celebratory. It can also be a painful space where identities are split, living both inside and outside their environment, and subsequently marginalized. Bosman’s texts, although published decades ago, remain relevant today in post-apartheid South Africa as much of his writing can be seen as a record of historical events. His short stories and novels capture a confluence of languages, people and cultures. His essays illustrate a deep commitment to promoting South African culture and literature. When reading Bosman one is constantly reminded that differences are not only to be acknowledged, but embraced, in what he prophetically imagined as a hybrid, post-apartheid South African society.
27
Springer, Michael Leicester. ""Form fading among fading forms" death, language and madness in the novels of Samuel Beckett." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002240.
Full textAbstract:
The primary thesis of this dissertation is that the development of narrative strategy and technique through the course of Samuel Beckett’s fictional oeuvre enacts a parody of the Cartesian method of doubt, in which the search for first principles, instead of providing grounds for certainty, is a hopeless, grotesque quest for a self which eludes any and every assertion. My chief concerns are thus, firstly, to explicate and elucidate the nature of such narrative strategies and techniques, and how these can be said to parody epistemological procedure; and secondly, to interrogate the implications of this parody for the epistemological and interpretative endeavour of which the human sciences are comprised. These two issues are explored by way of an examination of Beckett’s earliest novel, Murphy, and the narrative impasse that arises from the contradiction between this work’s largely realist form and quasi-postmodern content. I thereafter argue that the later fiction, most particularly the Trilogy, achieves formal and stylistic solutions to the aesthetic and epistemological challenges raised by the earlier work. Beckett’s fictional oeuvre, I contend, can best be construed as an attempt to attain that which exceeds and escapes narrative in and through narrative, namely madness or death. The achievement of either would entail the obliteration of the possibility of narrating at all, and the novels, engaging in a self-deconstructing endeavour, thus occupy a profoundly paradoxical position. Any attempt to interpret a body of work of this nature can only respond in an analogous manner, by trying to make meaning of the subversion of meaning, and deconstructing the assumptions that inform its procedures. This dissertation argues that it is precisely in the way in which it necessitates such selfreflexive discursive analysis that the import of Samuel Beckett’s fiction lies, and extrapolates the significance of this for an understanding of discourse, literary criticism, and epistemological procedure.
28
Chalykoff, Lisa. "Space and identity formation in twentieth-century Canadian realist novels : recasting regionalism within Canadian literary studies." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ56523.pdf.
Full text
29
Yorke, Stephanie. "Disability, normalcy, and the failures of the nation : a reading of selected fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:50a3e631-419f-490a-9995-f0fa511e5688.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is a study of representations of disability in a selection of Anglophone Indian literature written between 1981 and 2006. In this thesis, I argue that, in fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga, disability often takes on positive symbolic value as it represents the potential for the postcolonial polis to survive and thrive, but that the ultimate death or medical normalisation of disabled characters in many of these narratives is tied to a loss of political optimism. While these texts in many instances disturb norms surrounding able-bodiedness and disability, they often ultimately narrate a pessimistic conformity to scripts of normalization, and in so doing, map the unjust triumph of a prescriptive national or international politics onto a prescriptive politics of the body. As disability is eliminated, so is the potential for resistance to latent colonial or hegemonic forms. On the other hand, those fictions that narrate a sustainable disabled presence suggest the potential for the community or nation to emerge from oppressive social structures unscathed. I focus on applying literary disability scholarship to Indian novels which demand scrutiny through a disability studies lens, given their dependence upon the disabled body as a metaphoric object and the continuities in their disability representation and the representation of history. While the focus of my work is upon the nuances of disability representation as it is used to parallel the rise (and sometimes fall) of political optimism in these examples of Anglophone Indian literature, I also read toward an understanding of how the postcolonial perspective of these fictions may inflect and complicate disability representations, and investigate Western notions of normalcy as they are represented as intruding upon this literature and as disciplining the body in these texts. This disciplining is further explored through an ancillary reading of how medical apparatus and infrastructure, such as hospitals, ambulances, and especially doctors, are represented in this group of novels, as it is often in conjunction with the medical establishment that disabled characters are subjected to (neo) colonial violence. In the first chapter, which takes the form of a critical introduction, I discuss the terms of my argument within the development of disability studies, and position myself within the debates and concerns of literary disability studies in particular. I consider the antecedents and development of what is now called the cultural model of disability, and discuss how literary disability scholarship, which began its development with a focus on Western texts and contexts, has begun to extend its range of inquiry to become global in scope. I consider examples of the interplay of contemporary Indian history with biopolitical ideals and the paradigm of normalcy as it has been articulated by Lennard Davis and his intellectual predecessors including Canguillheim and Foucault. In the second chapter, which is entitled "The Medical and the Monstrous: Disability in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Moor's Last Sigh," I consider how the disabled body is created as an object of competition in an ideological agon between a violent, globalized modernity and a sometimes-idealized fictive past. While Rushdie often represents the disabled body in a very simplified and rather bigoted register, he also to some extent engages with the more complex potentialities of disability to represent the failure of the state. The normalizing perpetration of a Westernized medical apparatus against disabled people becomes the proof and of political disintegration and the dissolution of hope for the emergent nation, whether in Rushdie's fictional version of India or Pakistan. In the third chapter, "Disability and the Realization of Metaphor in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance," I consider Rohinton Mistry's disability representations in relation to his engagement with the tradition of European realism. While Mistry attempts to re-locate the normal type articulated by the European novel, and subverts the conventions of European fiction even as he employs them, he still depends upon a largely uncontested tradition of disability representation. While he re-locates the norm in many demographic respects, he does not fully manage to rescue disability from an ancillary and symbolic role in the fiction. Mistry uses disabled characters symbolically to imagine political upheaval from a disadvantaged and sometimes from a subaltern position, creating in disabled characters their symbolic correlates. In my fourth chapter, "Collective Disability and the Dis-located Norm in Indra Sinha's Animal's People," I consider the ways in which this novel effaces paradigms of normalcy by imagining an environment in which disability is the unifying commonality of community life. While Mistry and Rushdie ultimately write disability as narrative anomaly in the ways described by Mitchell and Snyder, Sinha inverts the paradigm of the anomalous body in his fictional representation of the Bhopal disaster. The failure of the Indian state to protect its citizenry results in collective disability identification, while those able-bodied individuals who might be treated as normal in another fiction become suspicious outsiders. In my fifth chapter, "Unaccommodating Fictions: Disability, Authorship, and the Politics of Failure in Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow," I consider the ways in which gay, disabled, Parsi writer Firdaus Kanga represents failure and dependency as character weakness. Kanga validates neoliberal competition by re-imagining the potential for economic and social attainment as properties of mind at the exclusion of the body, and, in so doing, inaugurates an adaption of paradigms of normalcy. Kanga's imaginary valorises the economically competitive individual, but simply removes the constraint of bodily normalcy from this ideal marketable man. For Kanga, economic freedom from parental, societal, or governmental intervention is edifying, as masculinity is achieved through uninhibited competition. In my conclusion, "Good Doctors and Bad Doctors in Rushdie, Mistry, Sinha, and Kanga," I consider the representation of the clinic and of physicians in addition to the representation of disabled people in the novels included in this thesis. Doctors and medical apparatus become symbolic correlates for different political impositions and political strategies, often representing the abuses and failures of government or of public policy. I will frame my discussion within Foucault's concept of the clinic, and will consider the ways in which traditional and Western medicine take on symbolic meaning in these fictions of India.
30
McQueen, Anna. "A class apart : the servant question in English fiction, 1920-1950." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/24485.
Full textAbstract:
In the reading of the servants in examples from the period 1920-1950, the servant question is invoked to expose the workings of class. The servants in these narratives of Bowen, Green, Taylor, Waugh, Mansfield and Panter-Downes, lady’s maids, housekeepers, nannies, a butler and a chauffeur, are in thrall to the collective structures of societal ordering, and reluctant with respect to social mobility. Class was not fully being negotiated in this period, in fact little change was visible. Fer example intimacy, such as that between the lady’s maid and her mistress, meant that class confrontation was unlikely. The nanny showed that culturally constructed mechanisms such as nostalgia could be employed to discourage the desire for change. In terms of the socio-historical context any transformation in the make-up of domestic life – that is, the move towards homes without servants - was a fairly gradual business. But, there was a widespread belief in a change that had not really taken place – and that certainly had not taken place within domestic service. Any transformation of society was superficial; the governing ranks would not permit their disempowerment through genuine class change. I contend that the literature supports this perspective. Servants desire subservience; they find comfort in the familiarity of the system of household ranking-by-status. In the process, authority itself is portrayed as being less immutable, more malleable and thereby equipped for the future. In this sense the narratives read in this thesis go to make up a literature of resistance, in refutation of the overwhelming narrative of the time, progressing instead the notion that class must persist with its boundaries intact, as its hegemony is desirable and necessary for the smooth, successful operation of society.
31
Mfune, Damazio Laston. "My other - my self: post-Cartesian ontological possibilities in the fiction of J M Coetzee." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002289.
Full textAbstract:
The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.
32
O'Brien, Lauren Leigh. "Self, family and society in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, Rachel Zadok's Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessings's The Grass is Singing." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006771.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It focuses on the development of each of the protagonists’ identities in three realms: the individual, the familial and the societal. Additionally, it is concerned with the specific socio-political contexts in which the novels are set. It employs psychoanalytic and historical materialist frameworks in order to engage with the disparate areas of identity with which it is concerned. The introduction establishes the analytical perspective of the dissertation and explores the network of theoretical frames on which the dissertation relies. Additionally, it contextualises each of the novels, within their historical contexts, as well as in relation to the theory. The first chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. It focuses on the protagonist’s assertion of an identity independent of her father’s role as a political activist, and her eventual acceptance of the universal difficulty in negotiating a life which is both private and political. The second chapter, on Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, examines the relationship between the protagonist’s traumatic experiences as a child and her inability to assert an identity as an adult. The similarities between the protagonist’s attempts to address her traumas and thereby create herself anew and South Africa’s employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a means to acknowledge and engage with its traumatic history is of import. The third chapter which deals with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing traces the life of its protagonist, whose identifications remain childish as a result of having witnessed her parents’ difficult relationship. Her understanding of the world is informed by a rigid, binary understanding, which is ultimately disrupted by her relationship with a black employee. She is incapable of readjusting her frame of reference, however, and ultimately goes mad. I conclude that, while my focus has been on personal, familial and social identifications, the standard terms in which identity is examined, namely, race, class, and gender, are present in each of the three tiers of identity with which I have been concerned.
33
Lee, Deva. "The unstable earth landscape and language in Patrick White's Voss, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and David Malouf's An Imaginary Life." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002281.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.
34
Wilkins, Wendy. "Images of Italy and Italians in the modern English novel." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2001. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/27857.
Full textAbstract:
The English literary imagination has been nourished on the experience and idea of Italy for centuries, at least since Chaucer's Italian visits in 1372 and 1378. A combination of survey, critical analysis and theory, the thesis examines the idea of Italy and the Italians in fiction in English from Henry James to the present. The thesis provides an inclusive account of literary themes and motifs about Italy and the Italians in the modern English novel, defining the modem tradition of fiction about Italy established by James, E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence, and describing the continuities and discontinuities which extend to postmodern, international fiction in English about Italy and Italians.
No single theoretical model is employed. An eclectic approach is favoured in order to draw together cultural history, literary history, discourse analysis, literary criticism and biography. In addition, the aim has been to recapture and examine the sense of flux and the idea of selfrealisation through art which characterise the Italianate impulse in past and present English fiction. In terms of method and focus, the thesis converses with ideas about Italy and the Italians, literary tradition, recent theories about the representation of place, and the notion of Italy as a favoured site for the development of literary identity and style.
An introduction traces the early development of the Italian image and establishes themes which appear in the succeeding chapters: otherness cultural and self identity; the 'gaze'; 'seeing' as a metaphor for self-knowledge; the importance of place in the formation of identity; and the connections between artistic representation and place. The second chapter, on Henry James, defines some of the main terms of the recent tradition, including the relationship between Italy and the act of imaginative creation. The James chapter examines the influence of Romanticism on his Italian work; the 'Italian' contradictions in his fiction; and his search, expressed in traditional Italianate tropes, for a transcending equilibrium. James's Italian tales are given equal consideration with the novels, and both are discussed in relation to the travel essays collected as Italian Hours. The third chapter, on E.M. Forster, focuses on the conflict between chaos and order in Forster's Italian fiction, and his concern with further perennial 'Italian' themes, including paganism, the Edenic myth, and the importance of art in self-becoming. The Italian motifs in Forster's stories are compared with those in his Italian novels Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View. A shorter chapter on D.H. Lawrence outlines his problematic place in the tradition. The final section deals with Italianate postmodernism. A lengthy introduction raises general issues and is followed by closer readings of texts which demonstrate the relevance of 'Italy' to postmodern writing in English. The English, American and Australian
authors chosen for closer comment include Robert Coover, Robert Dessaix, Michael Dibdin, Ian McEwan, Michele Roberts, William Trevor and Jeanette Winterson. The final section illustrates
the continuity of the image of Italy, especially the way its reputation as artifice lends itself to elaborate, postmodern metafiction.
35
Abatan, Adetutu Abosede. "Cultural perspectives and adolescent concerns in Nigerian young adult novels." Diss., Virginia Tech, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/40308.
Full textAbstract:
Multicultural literature is a very important tool in today's classrooms because it enables teachers and students to learn about the practices, historical background for attitudes, norms and customs of other cultures and peoples.Ph. D.
36
Cooke, Stewart J. "Received melodies : the new, old novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=75693.
Full textAbstract:
New, old novels, contemporary fictions that parody the forms, conventions, and devices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, form a significant and increasingly popular subclass of postmodernist fiction. Paradoxically combining realistic and metafictional conventions, these works establish an ironic dialogue with the past, employing yet simultaneously subverting traditional fictional techniques.In this dissertation, I subject five new, old novels--John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor and LETTERS, Erica Jong's Fanny, T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman--to a detailed analysis, which compares the parodic role of archaic devices in each contemporary novel to the serious use made of such devices in the past. I argue that new, old novels, by juxtaposing old and new world views, foreground the ontological concerns of fiction and suggest that literary representation is constitutive rather than imitative of reality. Their examination of the relationship between fiction and reality places them at the centre of contemporary concern.
37
阮慧娟 and Wai-kuen Jeannie Yuen. "Crisis and negotiation: a study of modern chinese fiction in the eighties." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1994. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31212050.
Full text
38
胡從經 and Cong-jing Hu. "A criticism of the studies of Chinese fiction during the period 1900 to 1950." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1994. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31234173.
Full text
39
Madi, S'Bongile Emmily. "Ukuvezwa kwabalingiswa kumanoveli wesiZulu amane ka 1990." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/52596.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2001.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This work investigates characterisation in four modern Zulu novels. The objective of the study is to examine whether or not there is development in the portrayal of characters in recently published Zulu novels. The study is prompted by the view that a high number of novels in African languages have inadequate portrayal of characters (Zulu 1998). Focus has been placed on the following four Zulu novels: Izibiba Ziyeqana, Asikho Ndawo 8akithi, Isidleke Samanqe, and Itshwele Lempangele. The novels were published between 1995 and 1998 and all have won literary prizes in recognition of their high literary qualities. It has been found in the study that the way characters are portrayed in the four novels shows some signs of development. All the chief characters are 'round' in the sense that they change and adapt to changes and circumstances. Even though there are serious problems, the characters are seen to be fighting like ordinary human beings to better their lives. It is also found in the study that antagonists in some novels are round characters. It is concluded that this study identifies positive properties about the development of characterisation in the Zulu novel of the late 1990's.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie ondersoek karakterisering in vier moderne Zulu novelles. Die hoofdoelstelling van die studie is om vas te stel of daar 'n ontwikkeling in die voorstelling van karakters in onlangs-gepubliseerde Zulu novelles is. Die studie is gemotiveer deur die siening wat bestaan dat 'n groot aantal novelles in Afrikatale 'n onvoldoende voorstelling van karakters toon (Zulu, 1998). Die fokus van die studie val op die volgende vier Zulu novelles: Izibiba Ziyeqana, Asikho Ndawo Bakithi, Isidleke Samanqe en Itshwele Lempangele. Hierdie novelles is gepubliseer tussen 1995 en 1998 en het almal literere pryse gewen ter erkenning van hulle uitstaande letterkundige meriete. Die studie het bevind dat die wyse waarop die karakters voorgestel is in al vier novelles verskeie tekens van ontwikkeling ten opsigte van die Zulu letterkunde toon. AI die hoofkarakters is "rond" in die sin dat hulle verander en aanpas na gelang van veranderinge en omstandighede. Selfs onder ernstige omstandighede, veg die karakters soos gewone mense om hulle lewens te verbeter. Daar is ook in die studie bevind dat die antagoniste in sommige novelies ronde karakters is. Die studie identifiseer positiewe kenmerke t.o.v. die ontwikkeling van karakterisering in die Zulu novelle in die laat 1990's.
IQOQO Lomsebenzi ubhekane nokuvezwa kwabalingiswa emanovelini amane wesiZulu. Kubhekwe amanoveli amasha ngenjongo yokuthola ukuthi ngabe kukhona yini ukuthuthuka ngokuvezwa kwabalingiswa. Okwaziwayo okwamanje wukuthi ukuvezwa kwabalingiswa emanovelini amaningi wabomdabu kusezingeni eliphansi (Zulu 1998), yingakho-ke lomsebenzi ubuzama ukuthola ukuthi ngabe luyabonakala yini loguquko Iwemqubekela phambili. Kukhethwelamanoveli alandelayo: Izibiba Ziyeqana, Asikho Ndawo Bakithi Isidleke Samanqe, kanye ne-Itshwele Lempangele lapho kucubungulwa loshintsho lokuvezwa kwabalingiswa ngababhali bemnyaka yabo 1990. Lamanoveli angawoshicilelo olusuka ku-1995 ukuya ku-1998. Kuye kwakhethwa lamanoveli ngoba azuze imiklomelo yokuthi abhalwe ngezinga eliphezulu. Okutholwe kulomsebenzi ukuthi ukuvezwa kwabalingiswa yilababhali balamanovela kubonisa impumela phambili. Bonke abalingiswa abaphambili batholakala beyizindilinga. Umlingiswa nomlingiswa lapho ehlangabezana nezingqinamba uyaguquguquka azifune ebuhleni ngempilo yakhe. Nanoma kunobunzima sibathola ngasosonke isikhathi balwisana nabo bazama izindlela ezizobasa empumelelweni. Kutholakale futhi ukuthi bonke labalingiswaabangabaphikisi (antagonists)babonakala bakhula. Lomsebenzi uphethwa ngokuthi ziyabonakala zrmpewu zokukhula nokuthuthuka ekuvezweni kwabalingiswa emanovelini wesiZulu wababhali bango1990.
40
Zaharchenko, Tanya. "Where the currents meet : frontiers of memory in the post-Soviet fiction of East Ukraine." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708117.
Full text
41
Wang, Labao. "Australian short fiction in the 1980s : continuity and change." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1999. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/27583.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis offers a critical survey and a comprehensive bibliography of the
Australian short story in the 1980s. Conceived partly as an continuation of Stephen
Torre’s study of Australian short fiction of the 1940-1980 period, it starts where
Torre’s thesis stopped, focusing on Australian short story writing published in the
ten years between 1981 and 1990. Torre has summed up the 1940-1980 period as
‘a time of development and innovation’ in the history of Australian short fiction. In
comparison, the 1980s is probably best described as a decade of unprecedented
expansion and diversification. During that time, Australian short fiction broke away
from its earlier domination by monolithic traditions and became a much more
eclectic and pluralistic form. Contributing to this eclecticism and plurality were five
different streams of story writing created by five separate groups of writers. Due to
constraints of space, the critical text of the thesis examines only four of them.
42
Pinson, Guillaume 1973. "Fiction du monde : analyse littéraire et médiatique de la mondanité, 1885-1914." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102151.
Full textAbstract:
This work proposes a double analysis of the mundane society representations between 1885 and 1914, in the press and the novel. This analysis separates these two categories of media to insist on their particularities, and tries to think of them in terms of an interaction.A first part explores the organisation of the topics and the main genre of the mundane society in the press, applying the social discourse theory. The analysis is based on the perusal of a set of representative daily newspapers (Le Gaulois, Le Figaro) and of weekly and monthly publications (Le Grand monde, La Vie parisienne, Femina notably, as well as around thirty other titles). It shows that the mundane society in the newspaper is constrained by a poetics stemming from the characteristics of press writing: collective writing, periodicity of the publication, text length limitation and reference to reality. Some texts are tempted by fiction, even though they keep a reality-based referential, whereas other texts that are openly fictitious, fit the mundane fiction into the newspaper.
The second part is based on the general conclusion of the first part: the mundane society in the newspaper is a represented society, made of for a distant and anonymous public. With the advent of the medias in the 19th century, the mundane society has entered into the era of mediations and "industrial writing". Some writers, from Bourget to Proust, take these upheavals into account and present the mundane society as a metaphor of the mass media society. This is done following three main axes: the temptation of withdrawal of the fiction into a closed world (psychological and mundane movement impulsed by Goncourt with Cherie, prolonged by Bourget and Hervieux notably); the games of exchange between the novel and the newspaper (Maupassant, Toulet, Legrand, amongst others); and finally, the isolation of the mundane world and the aesthetic work on mediations (Rolland, Colette, Mirbeau, Lorrain et Gide notably). All these writings address the question of sociability at the era of the triumph of mediations: what room is left for the mundane society, for direct encounter, for exchange, in a world of mediation and mass media coverage? for immediate connections in a society of mediated ties? The epilogue proposes a journalistic reading of A la recherche du temps perdu, synthesis-work which inaugurates a modern and sociological perception: it is in the world of the imagined mundane society, distant and represented in the mass media, that the narrator draws the resources for his observation of the world.
43
Shao, Dong, and 邵棟. "A study of yingxi fiction in the early republican China = Min chu ying xi xiao shuo yan jiu." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/206447.
Full textAbstract:
The dissertation attempted to study Yingxi Fiction, a genre of fiction, which emerged and prevailed in Shanghai during the early two decades of the twentieth century. The majority of writers of Yingxi fiction at that time were literati of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School. After watching the imported silent movies, they recorded the contents and adapted them as fictional texts for the purpose of introducing the stories to those who could not afford to watch the films. This type of genre was named Yingxi fiction and had been welcomed by public readers at leisure. In fact Yingxi fiction had implied how traditional literati received and absorbed western cultural elements on their way to pursue Chinese modernity. This study would like to conduct a close examination of Yingxi fiction, which has been previously ignored, through in-depth analysis of the texts and investigation of its social as well as cultural significance.
This dissertation consisted of five chapters. Chapter One was an introduction of the popular fiction, movie and Yingxi fiction in Early Republican China. Previous studies on Yingxi fiction were briefly presented as well.
Chapter Two dealt with the emergence of Yingxi fiction. The prefaces and peer reviews of some works of this genre would be especially studied in order to explore the motivations of the writers and their approaches to compose the Yingxi fiction. Three Yingxi fiction writers, Zhou Shoujuan (1895-1968), Bao Tianxiao (1875-1973) and Lu Dan’an(1894-1980), were comprehensively illustrated as case studies.
Chapter Three focused on the application of “Paradigm” in textual analyses of Yingxi fiction. Serving as an unusual spectacle, paradigm provided a thorough understanding of the hybrid narrative style of the stories. By discussing the narrative pause, redundancy, story modes and language usage, the way in which the paradigm of Chinese fiction influenced by western literature would been exposed.
Chapter Four discussed the graph-text conversion in Yingxi fiction. It was suggested that writers’ failure in identifying the moral issues and female images in western movies could be explained and might be regarded as the writers’ skills of adaptation of the stories for the sake of Chinese representations.
Lastly, the conclusion chapter summed up the distinctive features of Yingxi fiction, the prominence of the genre and its significance in modern Chinese literature. Besides, the limitations and reasons of fading away of Yingxi fiction would also be expounded.published_or_final_version
Chinese
Master
Master of Philosophy
44
Ni, Xia Jia. "From imagism to informationism :a study of 20th century experimental poetry in English." Thesis, University of Macau, 2018. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b3953521.
Full text
45
Rivest, Mélanie. "Nouveau théatre et nouveau roman : la quête d'un art perdu." Thesis, McGill University, 2004. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79975.
Full textAbstract:
The histories of the Theater and of the Novel have rarely been linked to one another. Nevertheless, studying the evolution of the two arts as of the seventeenth century, allows us to pinpoint and define the sources of contamination. It is more precisely in the nineteenth century that the history of both the Theater and the Novel became envenomed, going from fresh influences to disloyal relations during which time the Theater faded by admitting romanesque realism to take the stage. By denying its capacity to reveal the "real", the Theater failed its possibilities and let its art be disinterested from the theatricality showing all that should have been evoked. Men of theater participated at recapturing the theatrical art so to regain confidence on stage and near 1950, an avant-garde movement flourished to favor a renewal of vitality for the theater with a new language which utilizes all of what the scene could provoke. This "New Theater" is soon followed by a similar romanesque enterprise, the "New Novel", a group of novelists also wishing to acknowledge the right to explore a new style of writing.
46
Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
Full textAbstract:
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.
47
Ho, Julie Elaine. ""Half of life": male voices in the novels of Carol Shields." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2000. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31222596.
Full text
48
Fong, Sing-ha, and 方星霞. "Continuity and transcendence of Jing School." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B39558228.
Full text
49
Elbaum, Henry. "Rhetoric and fiction : interaction of verbal genres in the Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=75698.
Full textAbstract:
Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties is examined in the present study in its relationship to other verbal genres, primarily, the speeches of Party leaders, newspaper rhetoric and political posters. The first four chapters of the dissertation focus on such topics as the reception of Marxist-Leninist discourse by peasants and workers as well as its representation in fiction; the refraction of official discursive formulas in characters' speech and the dialogization of Party rhetoric; the integration of political documents into fiction and their structural function. Particular attention is paid to the way the contamination of Party rhetoric by substandard language and its contextual defamiliarization lead, depending on the overall authorial intention, either to a parodic subversion of official cliches or to the internalization of didactic discourse and the enhancement of its communicative effectiveness.The theme of industrialization is examined in the last two chapters of the thesis in its dialectic interaction with various Neo-Rousseauist conceptions, which either reflect the authors' own ambivalence about socialist construction, or constitute a rhetorical device used in order to reinforce dialogically industrialist ideology.
50
許子東 and Zidong Xu. "Narratives of the "Cultural Revolution" in contemporary Chinese fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31237915.
Full text