Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Objects in fiction'
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Baptista, Marco Simão Valente. "Fernando Pessoa's detective fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0f959d62-d4a7-4aa7-9e63-c02e40c40f5b.
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In this thesis I set out to write the first in-depth study of Pessoa's detective stories. I approached this task in three steps: firstly, by tracing Pessoa's interest in the genre of crime fiction, his readings and influences. Secondly, by analysing the themes and structure of the Quaresma stories. Thirdly, by placing them in the context of Pessoa's written output. The first step is addressed in the first two chapters of the thesis, where I study the connections between Pessoa and Anglo-American detective fiction, as well as how he adapted foreign models to a Portuguese context. The second step of my approach is developed in chapters 3 to 5. In the first of these I focus on the construction of Quaresma as a literary character. My key finding is that the texts featuring him are composed by two kinds of writing: on the one hand narrative prose, including descriptions, actions and elements that further the plot; on the other, an essayistic prose which consists of Quaresma's long speeches expounding his theories on criminal investigation, philosophy, psychology, and reasoning. Chapters 4 and 5 study several of the Quaresma stories from the point of view of gender relations and how these shape the construction of plot and character. At this juncture I use Lacanian and Derridean readings on Poe's 'The Purloined Letter', having previously established that author's influence on Pessoa. The third and final step of my thesis is an attempt to interpret Pessoa's detective fiction in relation to his wider work: I propose a reading of the Quaresma stories, other prose texts and heteronymity as parts of a literary project of creating non-narrative fictions.
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Leck, Robin Whitney. "Gatsby's Gorgeous Car: Objects and the Outsider in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction." Thesis, Boston College, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/443.
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Thesis advisor: Christopher P. WilsonGrowing up F. Scott Fitzgerald longed to be a part of the leisure class with whom he socialized and was educated. However, born into a middle class family and destined to be a writer, he never achieved that goal. This preoccupation with the leisure class continued into adulthood and was reflected in his works of fiction. In his writing he repeatedly depicts the outsider, a middle class character who by the means of monetary wealth hopes to rise in society. Through his relationship with the object, this outsider attempts to become a part of the elite and is rejected. Mannerisms and social codes that can only be learned by high birth restrict this individual from reaching social heights. The new wealth of the 1920's creates a paradox for the outsider. The object that the leisure class possesses is easily attainable, however, the upward movement it promises is still out of reach
Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004
Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
Discipline: College Honors Program
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Morris, Penelope. "Giovanna Zangrandi : a life in fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:94e6a200-531e-431b-9726-487c981383d0.
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This thesis constitutes the first detailed study of the life and works (published and unpublished) of the writer Giovanna Zangrandi (1910-1988). It is a study of the relationship between autobiography, fiction and history in her writing, in the light of recent developments in the criticism of autobiography and of feminist historiography and literary criticism. It aims to place Zangrandi's work in its historical and literary context and pays particular attention to the periods of fascism, the Resistance and neorealism. The thesis considers the nature of autobiography, and the implications of women writing about themselves, and analyses Zangrandi's use of autobiography, highlighting the inevitable intrusion of fiction into such writing. It uses that analysis, along with material including Zangrandi's unpublished diaries and testimonies of people who knew her, to write a biography of Zangrandi and to examine the way that she writes about the fascist period and the Resistance. The question of representing real life in fiction, rather than autobiography, is also discussed, with reference to Zangrandi's first novel and to neorealism. It is shown that, as well as her constant interest in the lives of women, her attitude to history and traditions of the Cadore, the mountainous region in the north of the Veneto, where she lived all her adult life and where nearly all her novels, short stories and autobiography are set, is of considerable importance. Her writing about the Cadore can be seen both as an attempt to write herself into those traditions, and as a means of expressing her commitment to improving society. Moreover, it is argued, her commitment takes the form of both autobiography and fiction as her concern to write about lived experience is balanced by a constant interest in the story-telling tradition of the Cadore and an interpretation of fiction that judges it to be an integral part of everyday life.
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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.
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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.
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Shepherd, Genevieve. "Simone de Beauvoir's fiction : a psychoanalytic rereading." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c0e315bf-104c-4e9d-8239-1a1f97f44462.
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Simone de Beauvoir's fiction is still a largely unexplored field. This thesis offers new readings of her whole fictional corpus, using as critical lenses Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in an ironically polemical move : vehemently anti-Freudian at the beginning of her career, Beauvoir denied the validity of his theories. Revealingly, however, her fiction tells a different tale. It is this untold Beauvoirean story I set out to tell in my study, which unfolds on three levels of critical interpretation. Firstly, using her own autobiographical admissions I examine her resolute resistance to psychoanalysis and offer possible reasons for her initial violent disavowal of its concepts. Secondly, I trace her explicit engagement with psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline through a chronological examination of her fiction, and, finally, I employ psychoanalytic literary theory as a magnifying optic onto her entire fictional output, thus offering new interpretations of her most underread texts. My conclusions are as follows : Beauvoir's resistance to psychoanalysis in fact stemmed from her own experience; by denying its value, she could also deny her own vulnerability, since the deep psychological damage caused by her unhappy childhood was still present in the strata of her own unconscious. Secondly, the thematic development of her fiction parallels the gradual acceptance of psychoanalysis as a valid clinical discipline following her self-analysis throughout her autobiographical creations - in her final two works, childhood and madness are laced together in a potent thematic explosion of her own articulated neuroses. And finally, the obsessive textual patternings betray her own repressed fears : throughout every fictional text, Oedipal triangles, fragmented identity and psychological breakdown play against each other against the backdrop of the symbiotic lure of idealised love. I thus hope to prove the relevance psychoanalysis has with regard to Beauvoir, despite her professed resistance to it.
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Vogtman, Jacqueline. "The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1268930284.
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Harland, Rachel Fiona. "The depiction of crowds in 1930s German narrative fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c8357884-eaf2-4daf-987b-82539148b38b.
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This study of 1930s German fiction adds a new dimension to existing scholarship on the depiction of crowds in literature. Whereas previous surveys on the topic have predominantly focused on the crowd as a revolutionary phenomenon judged on the basis of class perspectives, or as a feature of mass society, this investigation deals specifically with reactions to the crowd in its incarnation as a manifestation of and symbol for political fascism. Drawing on a number of contemporaneous theoretical treatises on crowds and mass psychology, it seeks to demonstrate that war, extreme socio-political upheaval and the rise of Nazism produced intense multidisciplinary engagement with the subject among German-speaking intellectuals of the period, and examines the portrayal of crowds in works by selected literary authors in this context. Exploring the interplay between literature and concurrent theoretical works, the thesis asks how writers used specific possibilities of fiction to engage with the theme of the crowd at a time when the worth of art was often questioned by literary authors themselves. In doing so, it challenges the implication of earlier criticism that authors uncritically appropriated the findings of theoretical texts for fictional purposes. At the same time, it becomes clear that although some literary crowd portrayals support a distinction between the nature of theoretical and literary writing, certain crowd theories are as imaginative as they are positivistic. Extrapolating from textual comparisons, the thesis thus challenges the view held by some authors that knowledge produced by theoretical enquiry was somehow truer and more valuable than artistic responses to the politics of the age.
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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.
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'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.
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Kerr, Matthew P. M. "With many voices : the sea in Victorian fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:873709c4-cc2e-4679-a7c3-12ddcca7c02e.
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This thesis considers some of the ways in which the sea was written about and written with in English nineteenth-century prose fiction. It has become a commonplace of literary criticism that, in the century preceding modernism, prose fiction about the sea was unthinking and uninteresting: indentured to outworn generic codes, tied to certain clichés of national identity, Empire, or slipshod sublimity, and vaguely evoking some or all of them. This thesis does not attempt a general contradiction of this view. What this thesis does suggest is that Victorian fiction is not always naïve about its subject and, at times, displays an awareness of the generic and stylistic hazards attendant upon writing about the sea. To write about the sea was to risk writing vaguely. However, to Victorian novelists who wished to draw on vagueness, the sea offered a subject and a style that could be put to use. The introduction sets out the terms of my discussion both of vagueness, and of the attitudes of Victorian writers and readers to the sea as a setting and theme for fiction. The terms of philosophical vagueness are compared with the nineteenth century’s most influential aesthetics of obscurity: the sublime. The purchase of these theories is then tested, first in relation to Ruskin’s lifelong interest in representing the sea in painting and prose, and second with reference to novels by George Eliot, Thackeray, and Gaskell. Prior critical approaches are also considered, as is the topic of empire, which I explain is not my primary focus. The body of the thesis is devoted primarily to three author studies: Frederick Marryat, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad. Each author wrote vaguely about the sea, though vagueness is shown to be, in all three cases, a resource that can be drawn upon with degrees of self-consciousness; if, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, vague language was considered appropriate to the sea, the linguistic resources that the sea in turn offered began to seem increasingly applicable to experiences characterised by uncertainty. I suggest that the sea establishes conditions that invite a rereading of the many repetitions in Marryat’s novels. These repetitions can be viewed, I argue, as traces of Marryat’s struggle to find a language appropriate to the ocean. In Dickens’s writing, the sea is often present as a source both of metaphor and of experience. I suggest that the slippery doubleness of the literary sea is a means by which both Dickens’s characters, and the individuals he encounters as a journalist, can be made to coexist with their ideal or literary doubles. In my chapter on Conrad, I argue that the sea forms a crucial element of the kind of literary impressionism Conrad recommends in his preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and elsewhere. Vagueness arises when the border between linguistic concepts becomes blurred. Two short interludes, on the subject of shores and depths respectively, consider such permeable thresholds. These interludes also provide a means of charting changes that occurred across the period, a counterpoint to the more temporally specific focus of the author studies. I conclude with a brief discussion of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Critics have distinguished the high modernist sea from what came before; this coda insists that the sort of vagueness valued by Woolf has an earlier origin.
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Day, Jonathan. "Novel sensations : modernist fiction and the problem of qualia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5079ce4a-028f-40dc-99d5-4237779bc203.
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This thesis examines representations of sensation within modernist novels alongside contemporary philosophical debates over the concept of qualia. Concentrating on the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Percy Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett, it confronts a longstanding critical tradition that has tended to obscure or misunderstand the implications of arguments made by philosophers of mind in relation to literary descriptions of sensation. That the mind is a thing, and that modernist narrative fiction is particularly successful at representing that thing, has become a critical commonplace. In this thesis I argue that interpretations of modernism’s supposed ‘inward turn’ are founded on a mistaken notion of ‘cognitive realism’, a critical position endorsing the idea that it is both possible and desirable to describe the mind (conceived of as a stable and unchanging object) without loss through the development and judicial deployment of new literary techniques. The myth of the inward turn in its various incarnations – the psychologised modernism described by many literary critics in the 50s and 60s, and the neuromodernism subscribed to by many contemporary critics – is, I argue, largely the result of a set of inter-linked misconceptions which attend the cognitive realist paradigm. The notion of qualia is central to my thesis. Defined as the ineffable, irreducible, and subjective properties of conscious experience, qualia emerge concomitantly with modernism, developing out of G. E. Moore’s definition of ‘sense-data’ and Bertrand Russell’s category of ‘sensibilia’. Though still disputed within contemporary philosophy, qualia create huge problems for materialist theories of consciousness, threatening to undermine critical approaches to literature which contend that formal literary strategies can ever hope to transcend the limitations of symbolic language in conveying sensation. The ‘problem’ of qualia referred to in this thesis, therefore, is the problem the concept poses for symbolic descriptions (either mathematic, psychological, or literary) of mental states, especially when those descriptions make special claims (or are interpreted as making special claims) of mimetic veracity. The problem emerged within philosophy at precisely the point at which the representative claims of literature came under direct attack. This thesis argues, therefore, that it is a profoundly literary problem, and that the absence of ‘sensation’ from the written is simply a manifestation of the inherent limitations of language. A critical tendency to re-insert sensory experience into the process of reading – through phenomenological interpretations of modernism, or in contemporary ‘neuroaesthetic’ approaches to literature – thus point to a general anxiety that manifests itself most forcefully in relation to modernist fiction’s ability to ‘write’ sensation. This thesis employs the concept of qualia as a way of contextualising narratives of the mind – philosophical, literary and scientific – from the period. In doing so it seeks to historicise modernism’s ‘crisis of the senses’; locating this argument in a broader theoretical space and questioning the relevance (and novelty) of contemporary approaches to reading the senses in modernism.
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Dasgupta, Ushashi. "House to house : Dickens and the properties of fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5105b20f-d521-4660-8b44-363170ca33c3.
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This thesis explores the idiosyncrasies of the nineteenth-century property market and the significance of rented spaces in the literary imagination, focusing on Charles Dickens's fiction and journalism. The traditional understanding of the Victorian home has been challenged in recent criticism that points to the permeability of the public and private spheres, complicates the ways in which gender mapped onto these spheres, and highlights the difference between home and house, freehold and leasehold. This thesis contributes to the discussion by showing that domestic space was a more fractured concept than the middle-class ideal suggests. Versions of 'home' could be found in a multitude of unlikely and unstable places: in inns, hotels, lodging-houses, boarding-houses, and private houses subdivided into apartments for income. Drawing particular attention to London, I reveal tenancy - the commodification of space - to be a governing force in everyday life in the period. The vast majority of the population had an immediate economic relationship with the rooms and houses they inhabited, and this basic fact had various social, psychological and imaginative corollaries. Dickens may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of domestic ideology, but as this thesis argues, rented spaces had an enduring hold upon him. Most significantly, for Dickens, to write about tenancy meant to write about writing. His tenancy narratives touch upon questions of genre, style, character, authorial self-consciousness and the literary marketplace - especially his dialogue with the writers working around him. I explain that the emerging prominence of rented spaces gave Dickens and his circle new narrative opportunities, offering them a tool with which to study the boundaries of different genres. Space, then, does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the novel, but plays a direct part in determining which incidents take place. Accordingly, the chapters in this thesis are principally divided by genre. The introduction lays out the historical, theoretical and geographical coordinates of the argument. The first chapter identifies some of the key features of Dickens's emerging urban style, situates his early work within an influential farce tradition, and brings the figure of the landlady to life. The second discusses spatial metaphors in the Bildungsroman; it ends with an argument about the 1851 window-tax repeal and its implications for literary lodging-houses. Chapter 3 considers the sudden growth of the hospitality industry during the Great Exhibition and its corresponding narratives, from comedy to sensation fiction. This is followed by a short interlude on seaside lodgings, where Dickens and his contemporaries modernised the pastoral for the nineteenth century. After charting contemporary debates surrounding 'low' lodging-houses, Chapter 4 demonstrates how these writers used rented spaces to make major contributions to the rise of the detective story. The fifth chapter, on living alone and living together, is largely dedicated to the multi-authored Christmas numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round; these witty collections suggest that the dynamics of the lodging-house reflect the politics of Dickens's immediate circle. Finally, a coda contemplates the legacy of Dickens's tenancy narratives in the late nineteenth century and beyond.
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Christie, Edwina Louise. "Dissimulating romance : the ethics of deception in seventeenth-century prose romance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:292cf3cf-7ecf-4b1d-a4ca-d2f5c65ab0a0.
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This thesis argues that seventeenth-century English prose romances are motivated by anxieties over truth-telling and the ethical practice of deception. From the title of MacKenzie's 'Aretina: A Serious Romance' (1660), I take the collocation 'serious romance' to refer to the philosophically and politically engaged prose romances of the seventeenth century. Following Amelia Zurcher's work on the concept of 'interest' in 'serious romance', this thesis examines a separate but related aspect of the genre's moral philosophical engagement: its investigation of the ethics of dissimulation. By dissimulation, I mean the art of lying by concealment. Dissimulating techniques include controversial rhetorical tools such as equivocation and mental reservation, but dissimulation is also implicated in laudable virtues such as prudence and discretion. The thesis traces arguments about the ethical practice of dissimulation and other types of lie through English prose romances from Sidney's 'Arcadia' (1590) to Orrery's 'Parthenissa' (1651-69) to suggest that seventeenth-century romances increasingly espoused theories of 'honest dissimulation' and came to champion the theory of the 'right to lie'. The thesis examines a range of works which have hitherto received scant critical attention, notably Roger Boyle's 'Parthenissa' (1651-69), Percy Herbert's 'The Princess Cloria' (1652-61), the anonymous 'Theophania' (1655) and 'Eliana' (1661) and John Bulteel's 'Birinthea' (1664), alongside better studied romances such as Sidney's 'Arcadia' (1590), Wroth's 'Urania' (1621) and Barclay's 'Argenis' (1621). It situates readings of these original English romances within the context of the French romances of D'Urfé, Scudéry and La Calprenède, as well as within the context of contemporary moral philosophy.
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Square, Shoshannah Bryn Jones. "A complicated compassion : the paradox of sympathy in Mary Shelley's fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e230bd7c-7846-4fa8-8a1b-d275a7e2a9b2.
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This study explores the formation and evolution of Mary Shelley's philosophy of sympathy, one which she continued to revise and refine throughout her lifetime. Her novels, journals, and letters reveal a persistent desire to understand what she perceived to be a deeply fraught emotion, a moral sentiment grounded in paradox. Engaging with the Moral Sense philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-1776), and Adam Smith (1723-1790), Shelley insists that sympathy lies at the very heart of our ethical being, encouraging recognition of and respect for the other. Yet, as she demonstrates in her fiction-from Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Falkner (1837)-when felt to excess, sympathy can mutate into an unnatural and harmful emotion capable of provoking antisocial, immoral, incestuous, and even suicidal behaviour. More than this, Shelley's investigation of sympathy exposes its serious limitations. Predicated on a similarity to self, sympathy, Shelley suggests, often fails when confronted with difference. Finally, through multiple perspectives, Shelley illustrates the complex and contradictory motivations behind sympathy, showing that it can arise from genuine benevolence, self-interest, or a combination of the two, an entangling of intentions that serves to further complicate this moral sentiment. Ultimately, Shelley's philosophy of sympathy acknowledges its shortcomings and potential dangers but nonetheless celebrates sympathy as a social virtue, as the locus of our moral selves.
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Williams, Simon J. "Reading between the lines : Arabic fiction in Israel after 1967." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:23a6d929-e16b-4f14-b240-c5cdd2d27933.
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Arabic literature in Israel has evaded critical attention, or has been treated as an uncomplicated part of Palestinian national culture, on a quest for unification and an identity that was devastated in 1948. This dissertation complicates that narrative through close readings of short stories by five Arab citizens of Israel—Imil Habibi, Muhammad ‘Ali Taha, Muhammad Naffa‘, Hanna Ibrahim, and Zaki Darwish—between 1967 and 1983. Focusing on the relationship between geography and fiction, I suggest that literary constructions of “place” and “space” by these authors reveal a range of cultural negotiations that break down entrenched dyads: Palestinian yet Israeli; Palestinian on the one hand, Israeli on the other; spared exile, but suffering occupation. Instead, these writers evoke the hybrid and ambivalent experiences produced in the paradoxical spaces of Israeli-Palestinian life. I develop an analytical framework that incorporates geographic and literary theory. I use the work of humanists such as Gaston Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Edward Casey to suggest that literature mediates geography in a way that communicates belonging, alienation, or personal and collective meaning. The framework is bolstered with the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, along with historical and political sources, to capture the contextual resonance of the texts. After laying out these theoretical guidelines, I offer a historical account of Arabic literature in Israel and embark on four analytical chapters. Chapter Two explores Imil Habibi’s portrayals of anxiety around post-1967 Palestinian reunions. Chapter Three focuses on the themes of Muhammad ‘Ali Taha’s Palestinian collective identity in Israel. Chapter Four takes up the theme of “the land” in the works of Muhammad Naffa‘ and Hanna Ibrahim, in the context of 1970s land expropriations. Chapter Five explores a long story by Zaki Darwish and its depiction of the body’s phenomenological relation to the homeland. Rather than portraying counter-narratives that suggest a binary of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” always at odds, these authors portray the spaces and characters in between. They disclose the anxieties of finding a sense of place in the context of a dispersed Palestinian nation, geopolitical uncertainty, social marginalization within the state, and the subtle geographies of a historic homeland that both is—and is not—one’s own.
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Muller, Cathleen. "Harry Potter and the Rescue from Realism: A Novel Defense of Anti-Realism about Fictional Objects." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1330719422.
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Philippou, Eleni. "Speaking politically, not politics : an Adornian study of 'apolitical' twentieth-century fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fdebd470-81a8-4c1c-9ff5-e211e4bafe03.
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My thesis is concerned with Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), the Frankfurt School theorist, and the implications of his philosophy for literary studies. I show that Adorno's thought may offer a valid contribution to the analysis of literary texts, even texts with which he is not historically associated. More specifically, I link Adorno with texts that emerge out of situations of political extremity but are not necessarily understood as "political" protest literature. Drawing on a variety of Adorno's texts, I assert that key concepts within Adorno's thought - truth content, immanence, the non-identical - allow us a way of understanding literary texts that appear apolitical, but in fact are speaking to the social and material relations of their specific (political) context. Adorno's exposition on the interface between the artwork and history usefully engages authors that problematise or dismantle our traditional conception of what constitutes the "political" - overt manifest content that aligns itself with a particular ideological position. I have chosen three twentieth-century authors (J.M. Coetzee; Margarita Karapanou; Michael Ondaatje) whose literature bear the burden of political extremity (respectively, South African apartheid, the 1970s Greek military junta, and the Sri Lankan civil war), and is at loggerheads with the literature of political commitment emerging from each of those situations. Each of these authors asserts his or her aesthetic autonomy over prescriptive understandings of literature as a vehicle actively espousing a particular nationalist, political, ideological or even aesthetically formalist position. The work of these authors, I argue, embodies an alternative Adornian version of engaged literature. In short, my thesis operates as a two way conversation asking: "What can Adorno's concepts give to certain literary texts?", and reciprocally, "What can those texts give to our traditional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?" This thesis is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.
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Traub, Courtney Anne. "Romanticising crisis : digital revolution and ecological risk in late postmodern American fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:adb4eb33-9053-402c-8322-bd55c915077f.
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This thesis probes how recent experimental American "crisis fictions" from authors including Mark Z. Danielewski, Kathryn Davis, and Evan Dara reformulate transatlantic Romantic literary debates about technological and environmental change. Arguing that such texts extend previously theorised ties between Romanticism and postmodernism, it identifies enduring ties between late-postmodern accounts of crisis and those of Romantic predecessors. Responding to the upheavals of digital revolution and ecological risks, these texts, published between 1995 and 2012, inventively engage several linchpin constructs in transatlantic Romantic writing: chiefly, the imagined supersession of subjective and temporal boundaries; a sense that the natural and non-human world is of crucial importance; and a reliance on idioms of sublimity to suggest the unrepresentability of the aforementioned crises. Although numerous critics have traced similarities between Romantic and postmodern modes, this thesis considers those resonances as deeper questions of cultural and literary history. It proposes to more carefully historicise the Romantic intellectual heritage in late postmodernism, identifying intermediating moments that inform contemporary accounts of crisis. It unearths how late postmodern technocultural and environmentalist imaginaries were always already Romantic. Deeply informed by countercultural, mid-century American movements and ideas that themselves drew significantly from transatlantic Romanticism, contemporary figurations of upheaval, syncretically figured in mid-century publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog, are indebted to both Romantic and neo-Romantic heritages. This thesis additionally argues that the digital revolution and unprecedented environmental crisis act as pressures on postmodern literary practices from the mid-1990s onward. Digital speeding and a looming sense of ecological risk register as even earlier crises than the terrorist attacks of "9-11", requiring a recalibration of what the postmodern might mean and do. Crucially, in their preoccupation with embodied realities and environments, including natural ones, the contemporary narratives examined here diverge from the assumption that the natural world bears little importance in postmodern fields of representation. Finally, many recent literary experiments figure themselves as materially participating in the technological and medial systems they respond to; formal experimentation is, accordingly, another centre of interest. This research examines how select texts deploy formal strategies to "materially instantiate" Romantic ideas, to borrow Katherine Hayles's term. Although numerous critics have suggested that Romantic discourse permeates digital cultural imaginaries, existing scholarship devotes little attention to how formal experimentation intersects with narrative strategies.
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Taylor, Nadine. "The creation of literary character in the fiction of Theodor Fontane." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:22d5d619-74e4-47d3-91c5-8f7236d1f25d.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the creation of character in the work of Theodor Fontane. Although he is repeatedly praised as a great writer of human character, there is no comprehensive analysis of how Fontane's characters work. This thesis is intended to fill this surprising gap in Fontane research. Its analyses do not focus on the author-text interaction as many traditional critical approaches do, but instead look at what takes place between the text and the reader. The first section, entitled 'Character in Theory', has two chapters presenting my concept of literary character. It draws on the findings of cognitive studies, including formerly neglected aspects such as affective reading and empathy. The second section, 'Character in Practice', contains four chapters. Chapter three demonstrates how our emotions can contribute to our understanding and what role is played by empathy. Chapter four shows the active role readers are required to play when putting together information about characters in Fontane's polyphonous novels. Chapter five focuses on character speech, and chapter six asks to what extent Fontane's characters can be seen to develop. The third section, 'Character in Context', takes a less hermeneutic approach. Chapter seven asks what our expectations of Realist characters are and how these influence our reading of Fontane. Chapter eight examines how our access to these characters has changed compared to the author's contemporary readership. Chapter nine presents an excursus, looking at the author's development from renditions of 'real' people to fictional characters. The last section compares this author's creations to the tentatively Modernist characters of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. My findings show that Fontane's characters demand and support a more active reading than Realism is usually given credit for. They suggest that the concept of Realist characters as largely descriptive creations needs to be examined critically.
19
Collins, Matthew Graham. "The fiction of Franz Nabl in literary context : a re-examination." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:67478695-5e36-41c3-be68-bd5857e33a2d.
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This thesis re-evaluates the work of the neglected Austrian novelist Franz Nabl. Nabl’s reputation has long been overshadowed by the prestige of Jung-Wien, denigrated by inaccurate association with the Heimatroman, and even unjustly tarnished by his appropriation during National Socialism. My work aims to correct these misconceptions, demonstrating that his best fiction merits rehabilitation not only in its own right, but also for the important questions it raises about conventional narratives of Austrian literary history. Structured chronologically, the five chapters of this thesis provide fresh analyses of Nabl’s texts, many of which have previously received only scant scholarly attention. These close readings are located in a range of relevant literary-historical and cultural contexts, illustrating that Nabl’s writing not only belongs in surprising literary company, but also that his works fit into important, yet often overlooked patterns in Austrian literary history which are often obscured by a tradition of criticism which values ‘modernism’ over ‘realism’, and privileges the aesthetically progressive over the apparently conservative. The first chapter investigates Nabl’s earliest fiction in the literary and cultural context of fin-de-siècle Vienna, revealing unexpected connections between Nabl and acknowledged modernists, such as Schnitzler and Kafka. The second and third chapters engage with Nabl’s novels, Ödhof and Das Grab des Lebendigen, establishing his status as a significant critical realist within a long tradition of Austrian works exploring unhappy family life. The fourth chapter focuses on the misleading view of Nabl as a regionalist, demonstrating that, while not all Heimat novels deserve critical condemnation, Nabl’s narratives of rural life invoke the conventions of the Heimatroman only to disappoint them. In the last chapter, I explore Nabl’s complicated relationship to National Socialism, showing that, although his involvements with the Nazis were ill-judged, Nabl was not committed to their politics and wrote only politically innocuous fiction during the regime.
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Moulds, Alison. "The construction of professional identities in medical writing and fiction, c. 1830s-1910s." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e78862c0-1b16-404b-8096-d6701cc7f443.
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This thesis examines the representation of medical practitioners between the 1830s and 1910s in Britain and its Empire, drawing on the medical press and fiction. Moving away from the notion that practitioners' identities were determined chiefly by their qualification or professional appointment, it considers how they were constructed in relation to different axes of identity: age, gender, race, and the spaces of practice. Each chapter concentrates on a different figure or professional identity. I begin by looking at the struggling young medical man, before examining metropolitan practitioners (from elite consultants to slum doctors), and the hard-working country general practitioner. I then consider how gender and professional identities intersected in the figure of the medical woman. The last chapter examines practitioners of colonial medicine in British India. This thesis considers a range of medical journals, from well-known titles such as the Lancet and British Medical Journal, to overlooked periodicals including the Medical Mirror, Midland Medical Miscellany, and Indian Medical Record. It also examines fiction by medical authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and W. Somerset Maugham, and lesser-known figures including Margaret Todd and Henry Martineau Greenhow. I read these texts alongside other contemporary writing (from advice guides for medical men to fiction by lay authors) to scrutinise how ideas about practice were shaped in the medical and cultural imagination. My research demonstrates not only how medical journals fashioned networks among disparate groups of practitioners but also how they facilitated professional rivalries. I reveal the democratising tendency of print culture, highlighting how it enabled a range of medical men and women to write about practice. Ultimately, the thesis develops our understanding of medical history and literary studies by uncovering how the profession engaged with textual practices in the formation of medical identities.
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Dunn, Jennifer Erin. "Ambiguous and ambivalent signatures : rewriting, revision, and resistance in Emma Tennant's fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6a4e8319-422a-48b9-8e43-cd05d742450f.
Full textAbstract:
While existing criticism of Emma Tennant's work emphasizes its feminist agenda, less attention has been paid to her rewriting of different narratives and discourses. Tennant's career has centered on challenging literary values as well as generic categories, realist conventions, and gender stereotypes. Contrary to implications that rewriting is "re-vision," an "act of survival" that corrects or subverts earlier texts, this thesis argues that Tennant's characteristic resistance to categories also extends to the work of rewriting and revision. Her texts suggest that the act of "writing back" is not as straightforward as it may seem, but deeply ambiguous and ambivalent. Developing theories of the "signature" that return the writer-as-agent to the otherwise anonymous field of intertextuality, this thesis traces Tennant's figurations of writing, metafictional devices, and intertextual allusions to show how these relate to themes in the fiction. Examining groupings of the texts from different critical perspectives, each chapter shows how Tennant's rewritings destabilize notions of originality, identity, and agency, and represent political discourses and social progress in an ambivalent way. While this thesis offers very specific insights into Tennant's work, the close readings also encompass broader themes, such as feminism and postmodernism, the gothic, myths of home and exile, and the ventriloquistic techniques of pastiche and biofiction. The arguments centered on her work contribute to the larger discourse on rewriting in two ways. First, in problematizing assumptions that rewriting inherently strives toward progress or correction, this thesis argues that rewriting can dramatize the ambiguity and ambivalence that haunt acts of resistance. Second, in advancing challenges to the idea that intertextuality functions anonymously, it argues that rewriting can return agency to the text by offering representations of authorship that engage with literary and cultural history.
22
Clifford, Dafna. "Unifying elements in European Jewish fiction, 1890-1945 : between disillusion and destruction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9701edaa-38b6-4816-942b-6071418ba395.
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This study seeks to identify and describe the characteristic elements of European Jewish fiction during the period 1890-1945. Writings that deal with overtly religious themes or which have Zionist publicistic tendencies have been excluded and emphasis is placed on works with settings that are sim- ilar to those to be found in contemporary European fiction by non-Jewish writers. In order to provide a broad comparison, the study incorporates representative literary material by Jews from both Western and Eastern intellectual traditions, and includes texts in the three major languages of artistic expression in these communities: German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. On the basis of this material, it is argued that, in three respects at least, there is an identifiable unity in secular Jewish writing. Firstly, there is a thematic preoccupation with thwarted idealism, which is elaborated in a complex interaction among such themes as social alienation, ambivalence in interpersonal relationships, political altruism and impotence. Secondly, there is a consistent treatment of the characterisation of women, the devel- opment of their relationships to men, and the role of the family. Finally, there is a special reliance on the literary device of irony, in both its verbal and situational forms. The introductory chapter provides historical background and gives a general outline of the thesis. Subsequent chapters are organised as a sequence of thematic and stylistic comparisons; firstly between represen- tative texts from Eastern and Western Jewish communities and finally between the writings of a Jewish and a non-Jewish author, in an analysis of the use of irony in the works of Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Mann. The German texts studied are Der Weg ins Freie by Arthur Schnitzler, Junge Frau von 1914 by Arnold Zweig, Kafka's Das Schlofl, Georg and Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer and Die Flucht ohne Ende by Joseph Roth. The Yid- dish writings are Di mishpokhe Karnovski and Khaver Nakhmen by I.J. Singer, Tsvishn emigrantn, Nokh Alemen and Mides-hadin by Dovid Bergelson and Di gas by Yisroel Rabon and the Hebrew texts are Nokhah hayam and Hayey nisu'im by David Vogel.
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Dean, Andrew. "Foes, ghosts, and faces in the water : self-reflexivity in postwar fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4c2e3b07-2454-457a-bf9f-a3f0734c89ba.
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This thesis examines the nature and value of metafictional practices in the careers of postwar novelists. Discussions of metafiction have been central to accounts of postwar literature. Where debates in the 1980s and 1990s about metafiction tended to make claims about its distinctive political and theoretical power, recent work in the study of institutions has folded metafiction into the routine operation of the literary field, and attacked previous claims to distinctive value. In this thesis I both historicize self-reflexive literary practices in the literary field, an element largely absent from the earlier scholarship, and present historically determinate claims about the value of these practices, an element I suggest is missing from the more recent work. To do so, I turn to the study of autobiography, specifically Philippe Lejeune's concept of 'autobiographical space.' In the first chapter, I explore how J. M. Coetzee develops academic literary criticism in his fiction. In the second chapter, I examine how Janet Frame responds to both the demands of a national literature and biographical inquiry into her life. In the third chapter, I address how Philip Roth handles the relationship between the politics of identity and the postwar novel. Self-reflexive practices, I show throughout, are ways of writing that were encouraged by particular formations in the literary field and were handled by writers through more or less explicit treatments of autobiographical space. I argue, though, that while these practices can be remarkably inventive, they carry no guarantees for political, theoretical, or aesthetic value.
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Manocha, Nisha. "Generic insistence : Joseph Conrad and the document in selected British and American modernist fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f28ba054-3443-4ba3-9e1b-c7939edc3d91.
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This thesis explores the citation of documents in the modernist novel. From contracts to newspaper articles, telegrams to reports, documents are invoked as interleaved texts in ways that, to date, have not been critically interrogated. I consider a range of novels, including works by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather, which are selected, in part, as a litmus of Anglo-American modernism, though they can more productively also be understood as coalescing around the example set by Joseph Conrad. Replete with allusions to documents, Conrad’s oeuvre is developed across the thesis as a meta-commentary on the document in modernist literature. In placing the document at the centre of analysis, and in using Conrad as a diagnostic of the document in modernity, the manifold ways in which authors use interpolated texts to perform denotative and connotative “work” in their narratives emerge, with the effect of revising our understanding of documents. These authors reveal the power of mass produced documents to lay claim to novelistic language; the historical role of documents in reifying inequality; on the level of narrative, the thematic potential of the document as a reiterable text; and finally, the capacity of the document, in its most depersonalized form, to realize social collectivity and community. This project therefore asks us to rethink and relocate the document as central to the modernist novel.
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Duggan, Lucy. "Reading the city : Prague in Czech and Czech-German narrative fiction since 1989." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3827cf9c-fa91-4fb5-aa7e-8942de885729.
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In the course of its history, Prague has been the site of many significant cultural confrontations and conversations. From the medieval chronicle of Cosmas to the work of contemporary writers, the city has taken shape in literature as a multivalent space where identities are constructed and questioned. The evolution of Prague's literary significance has taken place in an intercultural context: both Czech-speaking and German-speaking writers have engaged with the city and its past, and their texts have interacted with each other. The city has played a central part in many collective narratives in which myth, history and literature intertwine. Looking at contemporary prose fiction written in both Czech and German, this thesis explores continuities and contrasts in the literary roles played by Prague. It analyses two German-speaking emigrant authors, Libuše Moníková (1945-1998) and Jan Faktor (1951- ), viewing them alongside three Czech writers, Jáchym Topol (1962- ), Daniela Hodrová (1946- ), and Michal Ajvaz (1949- ). Through close readings of eight texts, the thesis approaches the imagined city from four angles. It discusses how contemporary authors portray the search for meaning in the city by imagining Prague as two contrasting realms (the 'real' city and the 'other' city), how the discontinuities of the city are reflected by the fragmentation of the authorial stance, how these authors assemble new Prague myths from the vestiges of older topoi, and how they confront the contradictory urges to uphold the boundaries of the city and to transgress them. In post-1989 Prague, authors explore the unstable spaces between continuity and discontinuity, constructing an authorial ethos in these areas of tension.
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Holgate, Ben. "Porous borders : the amorphous nature of magical realist fiction in Asia and Australasia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:32abdfeb-baa7-40ee-b721-89b66bc74043.
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This thesis aims to broaden the scope of magical realism by examining contemporary fiction in Asia and Australasia, regions which have been largely neglected in critical discussion of the narrative mode. My research seeks to modify and expand our collective conception of magical realism through key texts that challenge not only how we read the narrative mode, but also our expectations of it. My analysis involves a dual intervention in the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I supplement existing scholarship of magical realism with new paradigms of critical thought, such as epistemology, mythopoeia, ecocriticism, intertextuality and discourse on human rights. Each of the key authors - Indigenous Australian Alexis Wright, New Zealand Maoris Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera, Indian-born cosmopolitans Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, and Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan - subjects the narrative mode to differing intellectual, socio-cultural and historical frameworks, and in the process reinvents magical realism to serve their own artistic purposes. The authors' key texts demonstrate the need to recalibrate theory on magical realism in contexts such as Alexis Wright's depiction of ongoing colonisation of Australia's first inhabitants in a supposedly postcolonial country, and Mo Yan's critique of post-communist China. I argue that magical realism has porous borders, not only geographically and culturally, but also in the sense that the narrative mode frequently spills over into other, different generic kinds such that the distinctions between them are often blurred. In addition, magical realism's constant state of transformation makes it particularly difficult to define. Therefore, I propose a minimalist definition of the narrative mode and a flexible approach. However, underlying cultural elements and individual artistic expression in a text may sometimes limit magical realism's utility as a tool for literary analysis. Finally, I explore the notion of a genealogy of magical realism based on polygenesis, emerging in different cultures at different times.
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Beard, Alexander Charles. "Narconovela : four case studies of the representation of drug trafficking in Mexican fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7eb6c837-cb79-4625-86dc-38267d36047a.
Full textAbstract:
In addition to coverage in the national and international media of the ongoing violence in Mexico related to the drug trade, there has been growing interest in fictional representations of the Mexican drug trade, its origins and social context. There is now a considerable body of written narratives that have been christened narconovelas. A small number of academic works has charted the emergence of the narconovela and sought to examine how drug traffickers have been represented and evaluated in fiction. However, very little attention has been paid to the aesthetic qualities of ‘narco-literature’. This study examines four of the most highly-regarded works in detail: Balas de plata (2008), by Élmer Mendoza; Los minutos negros (2006), by Martín Solares; Contrabando (2008), by Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda; and Trabajos del reino (2004), by Yuri Herrera. So embedded is the phenomenon of drug trafficking in northern Mexican culture, so suffused with cliché is its representation in other media, that to write about the topic with originality and ethical nuance is difficult. This thesis accounts for the distinct choices made by the four authors in question to address this difficulty of representation in the structure, style and tone of their novels. The self-awareness exhibited by these works of fiction regarding the challenges of representing their subject matter render them the most sophisticated examples yet created of the so-called narconovela.
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Burns, Jennifer. "The fragments of 'impegno' : interpretations of commitment in contemporary Italian narrative, 1980-1995." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ab889ceb-e210-45e2-bd2a-c17248ce2a13.
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This thesis explores the representation of political and social issues in the work of a selection of contemporary Italian authors, aiming to assess what has become of the notion of political commitment ('impegno'), as debated by intellectuals in the sharply-defined political climate following World War II, and whether the institutional seizure then crisis of the 1980s and 1990s has encouraged a comparable literary response. In part one, I examine the critical works of Vittorini and Calvino, two authors central to the early discussion about the social role of literature, revealing the tensions between their conceptions of the relationship between writers and society, which, despite their close collaboration, are identifiable in their writings of the 1950s and 1960s. I then trace these different veins of thinking - which I have termed 'fault lines' in the solid mass of 'impegno' - into the works of Celati and Palandri, who express the socio-political consciousness of youth in the 1960s and 1970s. In the six chapters of the main body of my thesis, I consider the further breakdown, in the recent climate of political diffidence, of the traditional sense of commitment to a specific cause, into a fragmentary exposure of a variety of 'minority' issues in the work of individual authors or groups of the 1980s and early 1990s, broadly classifiable under the 'giovani narratori' label. This allows me to consider well-known contemporary authors, such as Tabucchi, De Carlo and Tondelli, from a specific perspective, alongside Ballestra, a young and little studied writer. My last two chapters discuss a selection of established women writers and barely-known African immigrant writers, assessing the impact of specific interest-groups on the 'impegno' question. I conclude by considering the specificity of these 'fragments' to Italian culture, within the general context of the postmodern lapse of faith in ideologies.
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Whicker, Jules. "Fiction, deceit and morality in the plays of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, 1580-1639." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:50276c64-555f-4584-9956-74a0ef3407b0.
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Alarcón was writing at a time when Spaniards increasingly came to perceive Spain as a nation in decline, and to seek the remedy for their country's malaise in a whole series of economic, political, social, and, in particular, moral reforms. One consequence of this was to intensify the debate concerning effect of the theatre on the moral values of the young, another was to stimulate a renewed interest in the art of war and the martial virtues which were held to have been the source of earlier glories, and yet another was to impel political philosophers and theologians alike to consider anew how the necessities of government in this uncertain political and economic climate might be reconciled with the ethical principles promoted by the Catholic Church. This study contends that both the style and the content of his plays show Alarcón to have been both well-informed and keenly interested in such matters, and indicate that, whilst he concurs with many contemporary moralists in identifying the source of the national malaise as a self-indulgent obsession with sensual pleasure and social posturing, and in suggesting that the cure lies in an adoption of a moral code based upon stoic self-discipline and other such virtues, he makes it clear that the implementation of these virtues in the complex situations encountered in everyday life depends to a large extent upon the prudent use of deception. Thus, in his work, Alarcón presents two principal forms of deception: the lies, slanders, illusions, and acts of imposture of those who seek the illicit gratification of their worldly desires; and the cautious equivocation, concealments, disguises, and stratagems of those who know that appearances deceive and who seek to ensure the reputation, integrity and safety of their compatriots and co-religionists. I also maintain that this is a distinction which applies to the comedia as much as to the world which it portrays, and that Alarcón is critical of the indecorous actions and the ornate language, music and spectacle of the comedia as popularised by Lope, and develops a dramatic technique which requires the spectator to submit his initial emotional and imaginative response to the drama to the scrutiny of reason if he is to understand the play. In this way, Alarcón's own creative technique proves to be yet another example of the prudent use of deception illustrated in his plays.
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Toker, Gulen. "Understanding And Demonstrating The Contribution Of Objects To The Construction Of The Idea Of Future In Science Fiction Films." Master's thesis, METU, 2008. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12609519/index.pdf.
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The science fiction cinema is often concerned about future, and presents to its audience possible alternatives for it. Each science fiction film about the future constructs a different idea in the audience&rsquos mind and supports a currently existing ideology at the same time. The science fiction genre extrapolates and speculates about future which results in a new world: Aliens, androids or clones become participants of this world, intergalactic federations regulate diplomatic relationships or natural disasters endanger the whole humankind. The indispensable factor in every case is that new objects surround the future. They are extrapolated or speculated as well from the objects of today in order to fit to and satisfy the needs of the future world of the science fiction film. The ideas about the future presented in the film are supported by the material existence of these future objects. This study demonstrates the ideas and ideologies in respect to future in the science fiction cinema and investigates how the future objects contribute to constructing them.
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Brook, Madeleine E. "Popular history and fiction : the myth of August the Strong in German literature, art, and media." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cb7df46e-ab52-4f27-a084-41d7fab5b54e.
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This thesis concerns the function of fiction in the creation of an historical myth and the uses that that myth is put to in a number of periods and differing régimes. Its case study is the popular myth of August the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, as a man of extraordinary sexual prowess and the ruler over a magnificent, but frivolous, court in Dresden. It examines the origins of this myth in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and its development up to the twenty-first century in German history writing, fiction, art, and media. The image August created for himself in the art, literature, and festivities of his court as an ideal ruler of extremely broad cultural and intellectual interests and high political ambitions and abilities linked him closely with eighteenth-century notions of galanterie. This narrowed the scope of his image later, especially as nineteenth-century historians selected fictional sources and interpreted them as historical sources to present August as an immoral political failure. Although nineteenth-century popular writers exhibited a more varied response to August’s historical role, the negative historiography continued to resonate in later history writing. Ironically, the myth of August the Strong represented an opportunity in the GDR in creating and fostering a sense of identity, first as a socialist state with historical and cultural links to the east, and then by examining Prusso-Saxon history as a uniquely (East) German issue. Finally, the thesis examines the practice of historical re-enactment as it is currently employed in a number of variations on German TV and in literature, and its impact on historical knowledge. The thesis concludes that, while narrative forms are necessary to history and fiction, and fiction is a necessary part of presenting history, inconsistent combinations of the two can undermine the projects of both.
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Lavery, Charne. "Writing the Indian Ocean in selected fiction by Joseph Conrad, Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Lindsey Collen." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bc0865da-1b17-47c6-8bb8-46a4fe0962bc.
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Tracked and inscribed across the centuries by traders, pilgrims and imperial competitors, the Indian Ocean is written into literature in English by Joseph Conrad, and later by selected novelists from the region. As this thesis suggests, the Indian Ocean is imagined as a space of littoral interconnections, nomadic cosmopolitanisms, ancient networks of trade and contemporary networks of cooperation and crime. This thesis considers selected fiction written in English from or about the Indian Ocean—from the particular culture around its shores, and about the interconnections among its port cities. It focuses on Conrad, alongside Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Lindsey Collen, whose work in many ways captures the geographical scope of the Indian Ocean: India, East Africa and a mid-point, Mauritius. Conrad’s work is examined as a foundational text for writing of the space, while the later writers, in turn, proleptically suggest a rereading of Conrad’s oeuvre through an oceanic lens. Alongside their diverse interests and emphases, the authors considered in this thesis write the Indian Ocean as a space in and through which to represent and interrogate historical gaps, the ethics and aesthetics of heterogeneity, and alternative geographies. The Indian Ocean allows the authors to write with empire at a distance, to subvert Eurocentric narratives and to explore the space as paradigmatic of widely connected human relations. In turn, they provide a longer imaginative history and an alternative cognitive map to imposed imperial and national boundaries. The fiction in this way brings the Indian Ocean into being, not only its borders and networks, but also its vivid, sensuous, storied world. The authors considered invoke and evoke the Indian Ocean as a representational space—producing imaginative depth that feeds into and shapes wider cultural, including historical, figurations.
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Laird, Andrew. "Modes of reporting speech in Latin fictional narrative." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cf04560a-fda0-4f0b-a53f-2e11c64b7a96.
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The thesis reviews the techniques employed by Latin authors up to the second century A.D. to report the spoken words and articulated thoughts of their characters. The study is principally devoted to continuous narratives of a fictitious kind: epic, 'epyllia' and prose fiction, although some consideration has been given to narratives in other genres for comparative purposes. Several means are at the disposal of a narrator for presenting the discourse of his or her characters. What is supposed to have been said or thought may be conveyed by quotation in direct speech, some form of indirect or free indirect discourse, or by the simple mention that a speech act has occurred. The Introduction sets out the terminology used in this enquiry and surveys the modes of reporting speech in Latin. Some attention is given to the views of ancient literary critics and theorists on speech presentation. The first chapter on martial epic examines the reporting of speech in Virgil and Lucan in particular. The second chapter on poetry reviews epyllion and Ovidian narrative, and compares the practices of authors working in different genres. Divergences in style between authors working in the same genre are also considered: the techniques of four poets who report speech in scenes involving the dictation and delivery of messages are compared. The final chapter treats the prose fiction of Petronius and Apuleius. For all the texts taken into account, it will be shown that concentration on speech presentation can broaden our insight into some fundamental features of Latin narrative.
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Glennon, Jenny L. "American ways and their meaning : Edith Wharton's post-war fiction and American history, ideology, and national identity." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:59954615-29ff-4da4-8632-b9887c24c218.
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This thesis argues that Edith Wharton’s assessment of American ways and their meaning in her post-war fiction has been widely misread. Its title derives from French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), which she wrote to educate her countrymen about French culture and society. Making sense of America was as great a challenge to Wharton. Much of her later fiction was for a long time dismissed by critics on the grounds that she had failed to ‘make sense’ of America. Wharton was troubled by American materialism and optimism, yet she believed in a culturally significant future for her nation. She advocated – and wrote – an American fiction that looked critically at society and acknowledged the nation’s ties to Europe. Sometimes her assessment of American ways is reductive, and presented in a tone that her critics, then and since, found off- putting and snobbish. But her skepticism about American modernity was penetrating and prophetic, and has not been given its due. In criticism over the last two decades, a case for the place of Wharton’s post-war fiction in canons of feminism and modernism has been persuasively made. The thesis responds to these positions, but makes its own argument that the post-war writing reflects broader shift in American identity and ideology. The thesis is broadly historicist in its strategy, opening with a discussionofthereputationofthesetextsandthatoftheauthormoregenerally. Afterthat entry-point, it is organized thematically, with four chapters covering topics that are seen as key components of American ideology in Wharton’s post-war writing. These include modernity, gender equality, the American Dream of social mobility, and American exceptionalism. The thesis concludes with an assessment of Wharton’s prognostications in the context of twenty-first century America.
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Aston, Richard Michael. "The role of the fool and the carnivalesque in post-1945 German prose fiction on the Third Reich." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:10b3780b-66bd-4467-849f-8648ec969c55.
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This thesis examines post-1945 German prose fiction dealing with the Third Reich in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World. My review of the secondary literature in Chapter 1 shows how few Germanists have examined the role of the carnivalesque in such fiction or used Bakhtin's work systematically. Having set out the shortcomings of Bakhtin's theory and shown Carnival's ambivalent position in the Third Reich, Chapter 2 builds on this theoretical and historical foundation by giving an overview of the different ways in which authors deploy the Fool and the carnivalesque in post-1945 prose fiction. This overview provides a context for the rest of the thesis, in which I discuss in detail how four authors use the topoi of the Fool and the carnivalesque in different ways to confront the past and encourage social change. Thus, Chapter 3 analyses Hans Hellmut Kirst's 08/15 trilogy (1954-55) which describes Asch's carnivalesque subversion of the NCOs who abuse power within the Army, and his subsequent development into a positive figure of authority. Chapter 4 argues that, beneath its bleak surface, Günter Grass's Hundejahre (1963) deploys the carnivalesque to transmit a sense of mourning and rebirth after the Holocaust. Chapter 5 deals with Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi and der Friseur (1977), whose Fool-protagonist provokes the reader to laugh at earlier attempts to make sense of the Holocaust in order to prioritize the act of anamnesis as an end in itself. Chapter 6 examines Gert Hermann's Veilchenfeld (1987) and Der Kinoerzähler (1990). Veilchenfeld is a carnivalesque signifier of Nature whose persecution at the hands of the people of Limbach parallels the town's ecological destruction, so that the novel can be read as a critique of the exploitation of Nature. In Der Kinoerzähler Hofmann uses Karl, a Fool-figure who narrates silent films, to encourage the development of critical faculties which combat the fatalism and authoritarianism that hamper social change. It becomes clear that the authors of the above works have anticipated the shortcomings of Carnival as a model of resistance and have thus redefined the Fool and the carnivalesque. So in my view, although the way the authors deploy these topoi maps only partially with Bakhtin's ideas about Carnival, these authors have understood the central concepts of the carnivalesque's ambivalence and its powers to subvert authority and use them productively to deal with the issues raised by the Third Reich.
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Liu, Qian. "Creative translation and creativity via translation : the transformation of emotional expression in early modern Chinese fiction (1900-1925)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1056d20f-45ae-4f48-8bba-e7f43705551d.
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This thesis makes an inquiry into the literary translation and creation in the early twentieth-century China, particularly between the years 1900 and 1925. I combine the theoretical approaches of both translation studies and intertextuality studies to form the overall methodological framework that informs the discussions in the thesis. Although the modern transformation of Chinese literature has long been discussed and debated in various scholarly works, which often attribute the transformation to foreign influences and reconstruction of indigenous literary tradition, a theoretical language is urgently required to articulate the exact process of literary adaptation and appropriation. Rather than taking the concept of “influence” at face value, I probe the intricate process of influence by examining the way Chinese writers and translators creatively translated and intertextualized foreign literary works to construct new literary texts. The two modalities of literary production – translation and intertextuality – call for the approaches of translation studies and intertextuality studies, and only when both approaches are taken into account can a fuller understanding of the literary scene in the early years of twentieth-century China be obtained. I apply my methodology to the study of the transformation of emotional expressions which are most frequently found in love fiction. By combining translation and intertextuality, some Chinese writer-translators such as Bao Tianxiao and Zhou Shoujuan creatively translated foreign fiction, conveying emotions different from those intended by the original texts while at the same time introducing new modes of emotional expression to Chinese literature. Others, such as Su Manshu and Yu Dafu, borrowed foreign literary texts to construct their own literary creations, appropriating the emotions conveyed by the foreign texts. As a result of the vigorous adaptation and appropriation of Chinese writer-translators, new modes of emotional expression emerged in modern Chinese literature.
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Guthrie, Neil. "A thousand wrecks! : rakes' progresses in some eighteenth century English novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b08473d6-9cae-4a14-b7a7-3e40cf7bb283.
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This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).
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Khalidi, Anbara Mariam. ""It was the worst of times; it was the worst of times" : popular prophecy, Rapture fiction, and the imminent apocalypse in contemporary American Evangelism." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e2e7da46-9462-448c-88ae-8a98a9482b8d.
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This thesis explores how the Rapture fiction and popular prophecy of modern American premillennial dispensationalism shapes the eschatological beliefs of its readership. This will be accomplished through a text-based critical analysis of the anxiety narratives of the Bible study and exegetical guides of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and its counterpart, the Left Behind fiction series. This thesis represents the first scholarly analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and the first situation of Left Behind fiction within its theological context. It will be proposed that these two sets of texts shape the eschatological beliefs of their readers through a discursive ‘streamlining’ that is performed in several ways. Firstly, the historical development of the movement will be examined, exploring the evolution of a specific premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic and its ‘channelling’ through particular cultural institutions. Secondly, an analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library and Left Behind fiction will demonstrate that this premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic is almost exclusively communicated through anxiety narratives which focus on expressions of horror, isolation, powerlessness and paranoia. It will be argued that these narratives serve to explore ‘abjective’ elements of premillennial dispensationalist belief, re-integrating them into the fabric of the faith. Particular attention will be paid to these abjective elements, which include the role of the eschatological body, the nature of individual salvation, and the perpetual deferment of the Rapture. As such, the popular media of premillennial dispensationalism serves as a further channel for the discursive streamlining of the movement’s prophetic scheme. Finally, this thesis proposes that the ‘deprivation’ theory of millennial appeal does not adequately explain the appeal and success of premillennial dispensationalism. As such, the following analysis will suggest that an alternate critical analysis of the movement, concentrating on its tropes of anxiety, serves to better explain the continued appeal of this ideology.
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Moore, Paul Henry. "Death in the eighteenth-century novel, 1740-1800." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5def918a-a899-4650-8850-efcacf3f4bf1.
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This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.
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Welch, Edward. "A Catholic novelist in context : suggestions for a reassessment of the work of Francois Mauriac." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:73570115-4495-4492-a21f-59ee6b6543d0.
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This thesis focuses on a writer who was a constant presence in the French literary field for a large part of the 20th Century and who, by the time of his death, had established himself as one of the major post-war intellectuals, yet who is increasingly typecast simply as a 'Catholic Novelist'. The thesis aim to counter this tendency by highlighting other, intriguing and overlooked aspects of his work and career : the pervasive presence of the body in his novels, his Sartrean sensitivity to the problem of intersubjectivity, or his post-war intervention over decolonisation, and the ethical questions this forced him to confront. The distinctiveness of the thesis lies in its stress on the need to resituate literary texts and other works of art in their socio-cultural contexts - that is to say, in the context of other discourses or representations of the world in circulation at the same time. Thus, Part 1 explores how both his artistic theory and practice are shaped, in unpredictable ways, by the ideological framework of Catholicism into which he is inserted in his early years. Part 2 argues that despite, or perhaps because of, his innate conservatism, Mauriac emerges as a writer who is sensitive to, and captures the nature of, the modern world, and the experience of living in that world. His modern sensibility is reflected in his preoccupation with intersubjectivity, one he shares with other writers of the period who are, perhaps, more recognisably modern. Part 3 examines how his political interventions, and his corresponding transformation from novelist to intellectual, are managed by L'Express magazine, and how in fact he came to collaborate with a journal whose politics were radically different from his own. Overall, through an approach which can be described as materialist and, from a religious perspective, agnostic, the thesis aims to demonstrate how Mauriac can still be seen to have relevant and interesting things to say to a contemporary audience.
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Han, Tong. "The Furniture of Science Fiction Films: Studying Audience Cognitive Mechanisms to Understand how Designed Objects Convey Social Ideas through the Semantic Differential Method." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1554212407770508.
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Garner-Mack, Naomi Jayne. "Eighteenth-century women writers and the tradition of epistolary complaint." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a4b7a20d-b36f-4657-929b-e5f375a49cd7.
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This thesis considers the presence of the epistolary tradition of female complaint in the writings of five late eighteenth-century women writers: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Robinson, and Frances Burney D’Arblay. The epistolary female complaint tradition is premised on the suggestion that readers are permitted, through the literary endeavours of male authors/transcribers, a glimpse into the authentically felt woes of women; the writers in this study both question and exploit this expectation. Often viewed by critics like John Kerrigan as a tradition that stifled female creativity, epistolary female complaint proves, this thesis argues, a lively and enlivening tradition for women writers; it provided opportunities for literary experimentation and enabled them to turn their experiences into artistic form. Five themes central to the epistolary female complaint tradition are considered: betrayal, absence, suicide, falls, and authorship. Each chapter looks at one theme and one author specifically. Chapter 1 examines the narrative of betrayal Hester Thrale Piozzi established in her journals from 1764 to 1784. Chapter 2 turns to Mary Wollstonecraft and her accounts of absence in her private letters to Gilbert Imlay, and her epistolary travel account, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Chapter 3 discusses Charlotte Turner Smith’s engagement with the theme of suicide in her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and her epistolary novel, Desmond(1792). Chapter 4 considers the strategies employed in Mary Robinson’s autobiographical, poetic, and fictional writings, which work to move beyond the moral fall the tradition implied. Chapter 5 focuses on the recurrent theme of authorial debt in Frances Burney D’Arblay’s journals, plays, and fiction. I conclude by considering Jane Austen’s appropriation of the tradition in her final novel, Persuasion (1818), and her transformation of the tradition by providing a resolution to the cause of complaint.
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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.
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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.
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Ready, Oliver. "From Aleshkovsky to Galkovsky : the praise of folly in Russian prose since the 1960s." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:874dcddf-7aed-4ff7-ab29-827ff3ac26ce.
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This thesis illustrates and analyses the appeal of folly to writers of, principally, the late- Soviet era (1960s-1980s). This appeal expressed itself not only in numerous portrayals of evidently foolish characters, but also in the widespread use of first-person narrative in which various masks of folly are worn by narrators to assert their detachment from societal norms and from the scholarly and 'objective' discourse which Soviet culture sought to promote. These tendencies towards folly and subjectivity are examined in their various historical, religious and philosophical implications. Parallels are sought both in the Russian literarycultural heritage, which has accorded exceptional importance to various models of folly, and in West-European literary traditions, especially that established by Erasmus. It is argued that, while the Russian paradigm of holy foolery (yurodstvo) has undoubtedly retained its importance as a literary theme and code, loose analogies with yurodstvo may lead to misleading or simplistic interpretations. In the Introduction I outline further my aims and methodology, while also providing an account of the cultural and literary background to the topic, before and after 1917. In Chapter One I discuss fiction by Vladimir Voinovich, Vasily Shukshin and Venedikt Erofeev, in order to indicate aspects of the general shape of my topic in the given period: how the 'praise of folly' developed and gained in complexity at the end of the 1960s. The bulk of the thesis (Chapters Two to Five) is devoted to more detailed casestudies of the work of three significant, but critically neglected, writers: Yuz Aleshkovsky, Yury Mamleev and the philosopher, Dmitry Galkovsky. The varied 'fool narratives' of each of these writers manifests, in contrasting ways, a profound and paradoxical engagement with the mind, wisdom and learning. If Aleshkovskian folly develops in a sharply drawn historical context (Stalinism and its aftermath) and bears a markedly Christian flavour, Mamleev seeks to exclude Soviet and Christian thematics entirely, seeking deliverance from thought and reason. Dmitry Galkovsky, meanwhile, assesses the entire history of the Russian intelligentsia's love affair with folly from his own radically subjective and unreliable perspective in his 'philosophical novel' Beskonechnyi tupik. The Epilogue is devoted to Viktor Erofeev's highly cynical interpretation of Russia's 'praise of folly', before concluding with examples of the renewal of its traditions in post- Soviet prose.
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Warren, John Binfield. "'Now try and recollect if you have done any good today' : household, individual and community in the early fiction of Harriet Martineau, c. 1825-41." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6eebc56c-9e1b-4a72-a853-f81e610a6afd.
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A re-evaluation of the early fiction of Harriet Martineau (1802-76) is timely. In failing to interrogate the reciprocity between Martineau’s interpretation of personal experience and her fiction, scholars have not fully appreciated its purpose. Thus, modern criticism has accepted Martineau’s dismissive judgement of her earliest tales. Five Years of Youth (1831) has been labelled a pastiche of Jane Austen, and the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4), which established Martineau’s fame, have also been subject to bruising attack – as poor art, and ideologically mendacious. Most scholars see the novel Deerbrook (1839) as a conventional romance. Although Linda Peterson and Lana Dalley rightly identify in Martineau’s fiction the trope of domesticity and its political dimension, the argument of this thesis is more specific. Message and discourse, whether couched as political economy, children’s adventure or romance, were shaped by Martineau’s ‘heartland concepts’. The product of her subjectivity, these core values were a sense of duty (initially allied to a previously-unacknowledged soteriology of ‘safety’); a welcome offered to adversity as a stimulus to progress; an attack on superstition as an enemy to intellectual and moral progress; and household relationships which were inclusive of children and servants and stimulated community engagement. Martineau’s definition of community, predicated on a sense of belonging, initially reflected the networking of her Norwich household. It was subsequently redefined as wherever her own household could meet a local need. This interpretation is supported by an analysis of Martineau’s engagement with her adopted community of Ambleside, where, in putting into practice her fictional teachings, she demonstrated reciprocity in action.
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Gera, Deborah Levine. "The dialogues of the Cyropaedia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1987. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fd2e7159-de3a-4186-9d4f-f320eec2a40a.
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This thesis is an examination of the dialogues of Xenophon's Cyropaedia. Chapter I opens with a brief introduction to the Cyr. - its genre, date, epilogue and place in modern scholarship. The second half of the chapter is devoted to an overall survey of the work's dialogues. The dialogues are listed and divided into seven main categories; various formal features of the dialogues - their length, number of speakers, presence of an audience, dramatic background etc. - are noted. The second chapter deals with the "Socratic" or didactic dialogues of the Cyr. These conversations are first compared to Xenophon's actual Socratic dialogues, particularly those of the Memorabilia, and are shown to have several of the same characteristics: a leading didactic figure, discussion of ethical questions, the use of analogies and a series of brief questions and replies etc. A detailed commentary on the "Socratic" dialogues of the Cyr. follows; some of these dialogues are seen to be livelier and more dialectical than Xenophon's genuine Socratic conversations and his hero Cyrus is not always assigned the role of teacher. Symposium dialogues are the subject of the third chapter. These conversations are shown to have several features or themes in common, such as a blend of serious and light conversation, a discussion of poverty and wealth, a love interest and rivalry among the guests. The symposia of the Cyr. are compared to earlier literary symposia, including those of Plato and Xenophon, and some of the more Persian features of these parties are pointed out. Chapter IV deals with the novelle or colourful tales of the Cyr. - the stories of Croesus, Panthea, Gobryas and Gadatas. The characters and plots of these stories are found to have much in common with the novelle of Ctesias and Herodotus. Nonetheless, it is argued in a detailed commentary on these dialogues that Xenophon displays considerable skill and originality in the telling of these tales. The fifth chapter is a brief commentary on the remaining categories of dialogues: short or anecdotal conversations, negotiation, planning and information dialogues. These dialogues are compared to similar conversations in other works by Xenophon. Finally, there are three appendices. The first questions whether Cyrus is portrayed as an ideal hero even after the conquest of Babylon, and the second discusses the problem of Persian sources in the Cyr. The third appendix is a list of the speeches of the Cyr.
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Dunn, Abigail. "The depiction of the widow in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:366c6541-25b7-4cb7-a5f1-8889d3b4c1d9.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the depiction of the widow by men and women in novels and short stories written between 1842 and 1913. The representation of the widow is analysed in the context of dominant views about widowhood at the time, such as those expressed in the writings of politician and statesman, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-1796). These ideas are set out in chapter I. The first chapter also examines the social reality of widowhood in nineteenth-century Germany. In the first chapter of the thesis Hippel argues that real widows are superfluous beings and men’s second-hand goods, but they were also perceived by theologians and moralists of the time as a threat due to their ungoverned lust. Many nineteenth-century widows internalised the idea espoused by Hippel and felt alienated and invisible. In German fiction, however, male writers in the works discussed repeat the latter theory that once deprived of their husbands widows are sexually voracious. In the works written by men, the figure of the widow is generally presented as a dangerous sexual predator. Female authors, however, highlight the invisibility of the widow and portray her as a figure alienated from society and her family. Henriette Hanke is the first author to be examined in chapter II. Her novel, Die Wittwen (1842), portrays five widows, who range from the self-sacrificing Lucie von Gardemer, to the liberated and financially independent Frau von Kleist. Hanke depicts widowhood as a process of education for her two key widows, Lucie von Gardemer and Franzisca Weihland. They must learn to love the right man, and at the end of the story they revert from widowhood to marriage. Fourteen years later, the first version of Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55) was published. Chapter III explores the way in which Keller portrays the threatening sexuality of his widow Judith and emphasises her power to destabilise the narrator. Chapters IV and V also focus on the widow as a predatory and dangerous figure, as exemplified in works by Paul Heyse, Eduard Grisebach, C. F. Meyer and Arthur Schnitzler. In chapter VI Hedwig Dohm presents a contrast to the dominant representations of widowhood in her story Werde, die du bist! (1896). Dohm challenges prevalent stereotypes of the widow, though with limited success. Gabriele Reuter, the final author to be discussed, reverts to male stereotypes of the widow in her stories. This chapter thus shows that women writers are not always more positive, or original, in their representation of the widow. The thesis as a whole demonstrates the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the widow in nineteenth-century German fiction. She is a figure to be at best re-educated and at worst to be feared and guarded against. She is a cynical man-trap in Heyse’s and Grisebach’s stories, a murderess in Meyer’s story, and an incestuous mother in Schnitzler’s texts. Hanke and Dohm, themselves both widows, show from the inside what it is like to be a widow in such a society.
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Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. "The contagion of desire : two case studies of appropriation art." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d86430f7-41dd-4b85-b094-2e256b899d9c.
Full textAbstract:
My doctoral thesis is comprised of two bodies of research: two artworks taking the form of installations (videos, audio recordings, textiles, texts), which will be exhibited for viva. Femme Fabrications, 2016, is made from research into the American artist Joseph Cornell's (1903-1972) source materials held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum alongside research on Jean Wilkinson's 1977 book Flower Fabrications. A series of textile works encased in silk lined boxes trace my step-by-step construction of a rose from organdie. The floral emblem of the white rose (dried), 'death is preferable to a loss of innocence' , becomes an editing device, which I use to consider a number of possible recipients for the rose, such as Cornell himself. Spoken word audio recordings, which ruminate on how his sexuality pertain to the criteria of the rose are edited together with home-camcorder video footage of the house that Cornell lived in for most of his life - the house he made the entirety of his artworks within. Central to The Cesspool of Rapture, 2017, are moving-image studies of zippers, stains, rips, abrasions, openings, and closings in a series of dresses made by the American couturier Charles James (1906-1978). These videos register and move through the material research, the garments, at alternating speeds. The changing speed is registered in sound by clicks synced to each individual frame. It is at times violent and at other times tentative and gentle as the uncovering of the damage to the dresses unfolds. Audio recordings of James explicating his interests in eroticism and sexuality persistently interject the footage. This work includes the installation of a series of reconstructions of James's 1932 Taxi dress. Its black linen body is reconfigured and abstracted as the splayed design makes unfinished seams and unzipped zippers visible. In each artwork I configure viewing and consuming as a mode of authorship. I show how these diverse processes of identification become authored acts. When drawn into intimate relation with the leftover material of these historical authors, my contamination proves deviant: I gain possession of the capacity to speak for them, to expose, idolise, misrepresent, and fictionalise them. My thesis is composed of this group of methodologies, which were found and developed within the production of the artworks.
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Shu, Mia. "Influencing identity through objects in ‘constructed realities’ : The role of a ‘diegetic prototype’ in influencing a person's sense of identity in relation to nature." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Maskinkonstruktion, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-166935.
Full textAbstract:
Human-nature connection is recognized for its importance for our well-being, development of our environmental identity, and potentially leading to pro-environmental behaviour due to the support of an individual’s intrinsic values. However, the fostering of this connection is not supported and being implemented within society at large. This research set out to explore the causes of the weak relation to nature and identify potential design interventions to enable the recuperation of nature as part of our identity. For this exploration, Speculative Design and Transition Design were chosen. In particular, Design Fiction as a method was adopted, not only it allowed us to speculate the future, but also materialise and explore the human-nature connection in ‘objects’. Transition Design was used due to its flexibility to explore interdisciplinary research and solutions, providing ground for the 'constructed reality’ and enabling the built-up of a roadmap towards this preferable future. Drivers that caused this problem were identified, and it showed how they are closely intertwined and influenced by, or are a result of, each other. One of these is how control and illusion of control plays a role in our weak human-nature connection. Through qualitative fieldwork, some of the ‘characteristics of nature’ and factors that influence human-nature connection were mapped, and they were embodied into objects situated in a ‘constructed reality’. These material objects have taken the form of home products in a product catalogue (‘diegetic prototype’) as human-nature connection can potentially be fostered at home as well as in nature. The response showed a potential in how a speculative ‘diegetic prototype’ can influence a person's sense of identity in relation to nature. Proving that the ‘diegetic prototype’ has an actual effect on the sense of identity would be impossible due to the complex nature of identity development as many different factors play a role. This research also provided a list of factors for designers to explore with regards to enhancing our human-nature connection through design. It has also shown the potential role of food and home in establishing human-nature connection, on which further research is needed.
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Palmer, Beth Lilian. "Strategies of sensation and the transformation of the Press, 1860-1880 : Mary Braddon, Florence Marryat and Ellen Wood, female author-editors, and the sensation phenomenon in mid-Victorian magazine publishing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:30a509c7-2ba3-4477-9d3e-801f61e1b8c1.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the processes of writerly and editorial literary production undertaken by women sensation authors in the 1860s and 1870s. This focus represents a shift from the prevailing critical emphasis on the consumption of sensation fiction to the realm of production and therein allows the thesis to analyse the ways in which sensation operates as a set of rhetorical and linguistic strategies for women writers in the changing publishing conditions of mid-to-late Victorian society. I consider the ways in which sensation is an idiom that permeates all aspects of magazine publishing in this period and demonstrate how it could be adapted and become an empowering discourse for women writers and editors. Furthermore, this thesis sees sensation as an important component in the transformation of the press in the 1860s and 1870s. By analysing the specific ways in which sensational strategies were appropriated and transformed, this thesis reassesses the role of sensation in the creation of women’s writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, and consider its legacies in later ‘New Woman’ writers. I achieve this by examining three women editors, who were part of the transformation of magazine publishing in the period. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood (1814-1887), and Florence Marryat (1837-1899) all operated as writers and editors in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They produced varying types of sensational fiction that they serialised in their own monthly magazines, Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively. Sensation provided a dynamic and flexible means for these women author-editors to assert their status in the context of the expansion of the press in the 1860s and 1870s. I argue that their work invites a more fluid and generous critical definition of sensation.