Dissertations / Theses: 'Science fiction, English – History and criticism'

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Blatchford, Mathew. "The old New Wave : a study of the 'New Wave' in British science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s, with special reference to the works of Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Harry Harrison and Michael Moorcock." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22150.

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Bibliography: pages 174-184.
This thesis examines the 'New Wave' in British science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s. The use of the terms 'science fiction' and 'New Wave' in the thesis are defined through a use of elements of the ideological theories of Louis Althusser. The New Wave is seen as a change in the ideological framework of the science fiction establishment. For oonvenience, the progress of the New Wave is divided into three stages, each covered by a chapter. Works by the four most prominent writers in the movement are discussed.

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Ejsmund, Arnika Nora. ""Light is the left hand of darkness" : breaking away from invalid dichotomies in science fiction." Diss., Pretoria : [s.n.], 2002. http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-06172005-111926.

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Hall, Karen Peta. "Discovering the lost race story : writing science fiction, writing temporality." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0216.

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Genres are constituted, implicitly and explicitly, through their construction of the past. Genres continually reconstitute themselves, as authors, producers and, most importantly, readers situate texts in relation to one another; each text implies a reader who will locate the text on a spectrum of previously developed generic characteristics. Though science fiction appears to be a genre concerned with the future, I argue that the persistent presence of lost race stories where the contemporary world and groups of people thought to exist only in the past intersect in science fiction demonstrates that the past is crucial in the operation of the genre. By tracing the origins and evolution of the lost race story from late nineteenth-century novels through the early twentieth-century American pulp science fiction magazines to novel-length narratives, and narrative series, at the end of the twentieth century, this thesis shows how the consistent presence, and varied uses, of lost race stories in science fiction complicates previous critical narratives of the history and definitions of science fiction.

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Toerien, Michelle. "Boundaries in cyberpunk fiction : William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, and Neal Stephenson's Snow crash." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/51639.

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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2000.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Cyberpunk literature explores the effects that developments in technology will have on the lives of individuals in the future. Technology is seen as having the potential to be of benefit to society, but it is also seen as a dangerous tool that can be used to severely limit humanity's freedom. Most of the characters in the texts I examine wish to perpetuate the boundaries that contain them in a desperate search for stability. Only a few individuals manage to move beyond the boundaries created by multinational corporations that use technology, drugs or religion for their own benefit. This thesis will provide a definition of cyberpunk and explore its development from science fiction and postmodern writing. The influence of postmodern thinking on cyberpunk literature can be seen in its move from stability to fluidity, and in its insistence on the impossibility of creating fixed boundaries. Cyberpunk does not see the future of humanity as stable, and argues that it will be necessary for humanity to move beyond the boundaries that contain it. The novels I discuss present different views concerning the nature of humanity's merging with technology. One view is that humanity is moving towards a posthuman future, while some argue that humanity is not discarded, but that these characters have merely evolved to the next step in the natural development of humankind. Both these views deal with constant change, a notion advocated by both postmodernism and cyberpunk.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: "Cyberpunk" literatuur ondersoek die uitwerking wat tegnologiese ontwikkeling in die toekoms op die lewens van individue sal hê. Tegnologie word gesien as tot moontlike voordeel vir die samelewing, maar dit kan ook 'n gevaarlike wapen wees wat gebruik kan word om die mens se vryheid in te perk. Die meerderheid van die karakters in die romans wat ek bespreek verkies om die grense wat hulle inperk te handhaaf in 'n desperate strewe na stabiliteit. Slegs 'n paar individue kry dit wel reg om verby die grense te breek wat deur multinasionale organisasies geskep word vir hul eie gewin. In hierdie tesis kyk ek na 'n definisie van "cyberpunk" en ek ondersoek die invloed van wetenskapsfiksie en postmodernisme op die ontwikkeling van die beweging. Die invloed van postmodernistiese denke kan gesien word in "cyberpunk" se fokus op veranderlikheid eerder as stabiliteit. "Cyberpunk" sien nie die toekoms van die mens as stabiel nie, en die argument is dat dit nodig is vir die mens om verby die grense te beweeg wat vryheid inperk. Die romans wat ek bespreek bevat verskillende sieninge oor die tipe samesmelting wat die mens en tegnologie sal hê. Sommige voel dat die kategorie "mens" permanent agterlaat gaan word, terwyl ander argumenteer dat individue slegs sal ontwikkel tot die volgende stap in die natuurlike ontwikkeling van die mens. Voortdurende verandering is die fokus van beide hierdie standpunte, en dit is ook die belangrikste fokus van beide "cyberpunk" en postmodernisme.

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Mighall, Robert. "The brigand in the laboratory : a study of the discursive exchange between Gothic fiction and nineteenth-century medico-legal science." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683119.

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Glover, Jayne Ashleigh. ""A complex and delicate web" : a comparative study of selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002241.

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This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.

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Chew, Laureen. "Chinese American images in selected children's fiction for kindergarten through sixth grade." Scholarly Commons, 1986. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/2131.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate Chinese American images in selected children's fiction to determine whether or not data support the position of the Council on Interracial Books for Children, that the works of fiction studied tend to stereotype Chinese Americans. After reading the selected fifteen works of fiction, a criterion checklist was devised by the investigator to examine the behavior and lifestyle of Chinese Americans depicted in a variety of circumstances. validity of the criterion checklist was established by a panel of experts in the area of Chinese American studies. Inter-rater reliability was determined by two readers who utilized the criterion checklist to analyze the content of one lower elementary grade and one upper elementary grade work of fiction. Finally, the criterion checklist was used to analyze the fifteen works of fiction and draw conclusions related to the purpose of this study. The findings in this study do support the conclusions of the Council on Interracial Books for Children that this group of fiction portrays Chinese Americans in a one dimensional, stereotypic manner. In the checklist items related to environment, food, utensils, physical attributes, cultural celebrations, occupations, and recreation, Chinese Americans were portrayed as adhering to Chinese-specific characteristics. However, in cross-cultural and behavioral items, Chinese Americans were portrayed as desiring Western-specific characteristics. This tendency was especially prevalent in upper elementary grade fiction. A more integrative or multi-dimensional view of Chinese Americans appreciating, and able to function well in, both cultural contexts is disconcertingly absent. Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations are made: 1. That teachers, librarians, and other school personnel who use this collection of books, supplement them with materials containing contemporary and realistic information about Chinese Americans. 2. That future writers of children's fiction dealing with Chinese Americans portray them in a multidimensional manner. 3. That curriculum writers of textbooks use a similar criterion checklist to offset the one-dimensionality of Chinese American images in existing children's literature. 4. That future writers of children's fiction on Chinese Americans utilize a criterion checklist such as the one in this study to assist them in developing multi-dimensional characters.

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Dedman, Stephen. "Techronomicon (novel) ; and The weapon shop : the relationship between American science fiction and the US military (dissertation)." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0093.

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Techronomicon Techronomicon is a science fiction novel that examines far-future military actions from several different perspectives. Human beings have colonized several planets with help from the enigmatic and more technologically advanced Zhir, who gave spaceships and habitable worlds to those they deemed suitable and their descendants. The Joint Expeditionary Force is the military arm of the Universal Faith, called in when conflicts arise that the Faith decides are beyond the local government and militia and require their intervention. Leneveldt and Roader are JEF officers assigned to Operation Techronomicon, investigating what seems to be a Zhir-built defence shield around the planet Lassana. Another JEF company sent to Kalaabhavan after the murder of the planets Confessor-General loses its CO to a land-mine, and Lieutenant Hellerman reluctantly accepts command. Chevalier, a civilian pilot, takes refugees fleeing military-run detention camps on Ararat to a biological research station on otherwise uninhabited Lila. The biologists on Lila discover a symbiote that enables humans to photosynthesize, which comes to the attention of Operation Techronomicon and the JEF's Weapons Research Division. Leneveldt and Roeder, frustrated by the lack of progress on Lassana, are sent to Lila to detain the biologists, who flee into the swamps. Hellerman's efforts to restore peace on Kalaabhavan are frustrated by the Confessors, and his company finds itself besieged by insurgents. The novel explores individuals' motives for choosing or rejecting violence and/or military service; the lessons they learn about themselves and their enemies; and the possible results of attempts to forcibly suppress ideas.

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Martin, Jocelyn S. "Re/membering: articulating cultural identity in Philippine fiction in English." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210163.

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This dissertation examines how Philippine (or Filipino) authors emphasise the need for articulating or “re/membering” cultural identity. The researcher mainly draws from the theory of Caribbean critic, Stuart Hall, who views cultural identity as an articulation which allows “the fragmented, decentred human agent” to be considered as one who is both “subject-ed” by power but/and one who is capable of acting against those powers (Grossberg 1996 [1986]: 157, emphasis mine). Applied to the Philippine context, this writer argues that, instead of viewing an apparent fragmented Filipino identity as a hindrance to “defining” cultural identity, she views the “damaged” (Fallows 1987) Filipino history as a the material itself which allows articulation of identity. Instead of reducing the cultural identity of a people to what-they-could-have-been-had-history-not-intervened, she puts forward a vision of identity which attempts to transfigure these “damages” through the efforts of coming-to-terms with history. While this point of view has already been shared by other critics (such as Feria 1991 or Dalisay 1998:145), the author’s contribution lies in presenting re/membering to describe a specific type of articulation which neither permits one to deny wounds of the past nor stagnate in them. Moreover, re/membering allows one to understand continuous re-articulations of “new” identities (due to current migration), while putting an “arbitrary closure” (Hall) to simplistic re-articulations which may only further the “lines of tendential forces” (such as black or brown skin bias) or hegemonic practices.

Written as such (with a slash),“re/membering” encapsulates the following three-fold meaning: (1) a “re-membering”, to indicate “a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (Bhabha 1994:63); as (2) a “re-membering” or a re-integration into a group and; as (3) “remembering” which implies possessing “memory or … set [ting] off in search of a memory” (Ricoeur 2004:4). As a morphological unit, “re/membering” designates, the ways in which Filipino authors try to articulate cultural identity through the routes of colonisation, migration and dictatorship.

The authors studied in this thesis include: Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Frank Sionil José, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, and Merlinda Bobis. Sixty-years separate Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1943) from Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003). Analysis of these works reveals how articulation is both difficult and hopeful. On the one hand, authors criticize the lack of efforts and seriousness towards articulation of cultural identity as re/membering (coming to terms with the past, fostering belonging and cultivating memory). Not only is re/membering challenged by double-consciousness (Du Bois 1994), dismemberment and forgetting, moreover, its necessity is likewise hard to recognize because of pain, trauma, phenomena of splitting, escapist attitudes and preferences for a “comfortable captivity”.

On the other hand, re/membering can also be described as hopeful by the way authors themselves make use of literature to articulate identity through research, dialogue, time, reconciliation and re-creation. Although painstaking and difficult, re/membering is important and necessary because what is at stake is an articulated Philippine cultural identity. However, who would be prepared to make the effort?

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Cette thèse démontre que, pour les auteurs philippins, l’articulation ou « re/membering » l'identité culturelle, est nécessaire. Le chercheur s'appuie principalement sur la théorie de Stuart Hall, qui perçoit l'identité culturelle comme une articulation qui permet de considérer l’homme assujetti capable aussi d'agir contre des pouvoirs (cf. Grossberg 1996 [1986]: 157). Appliquée au contexte philippin, cet auteur soutient que, au lieu de la visualisation d'une identité fragmentée apparente comme un obstacle à une « définition » de l'identité culturelle, elle regarde l’histoire philippine «abîmée» (Fallows 1987) comme le matériel même qui permet l'articulation d’identité. Au lieu de réduire l'identité culturelle d'un peuple à ce qu’ ils auraint pû être avant les interventions de l’histoire, elle met en avant une vision de l'identité qui cherche à transfigurer ces "dommages" par un travail d’acceptation avec l'histoire.

Bien que ce point de vue a déjà été partagé par d'autres critiques (tels que Feria 1991 ou Dalisay 1998:145), la contribution de l'auteur réside dans la présentation de « re/membering » pour décrire un type d'articulation sans refouler les plaies du passé, mais sans stagner en elles non plus. De plus, « re/membering » permet de comprendre de futures articulations de « nouvelles » identités culturelles (en raison de la migration en cours), tout en mettant une «fermeture arbitraire» (Hall) aux ré-articulations simplistes qui ne font que promouvoir des “lines of tendential forces” (Hall) (tels que des préjugés sur la couleur brune ou noire de peau) ou des pratiques hégémoniques.

Rédigé en tant que telle (avec /), « re/membering » comporte une triple signification: (1) une «re-membering », pour indiquer une mise ensemble d’un passé fragmenté pour donner un sens au traumatisme du présent (cf. Bhabha, 1994:63); (2) une «re-membering» ou une ré-intégration dans un groupe et finalement, comme (3)"remembering", qui suppose la possession de mémoire ou une recherche d'une mémoire »(Ricoeur 2004:4). Comme unité morphologique, « re/membering » désigne la manière dont les auteurs philippins tentent d'articuler l'identité culturelle à travers les routes de la colonisation, les migrations et la dictature.

Les auteurs inclus dans cette thèse sont: Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, NVM Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Frank Sionil José, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, et Merlinda Bobis. Soixante ans séparent America is in the Heart (1943) du Bulosan et le Dream Jungle (2003) du Hagedorn. L'analyse de ces œuvres révèle la façon dont l'articulation est à la fois difficile et pleine d'espoir. D'une part, les auteurs critiquent le manque d'efforts envers l'articulation en tant que « re/membering » (confrontation avec le passé, reconnaissance de l'appartenance et cultivation de la mémoire). Non seulement est « re/membering » heurté par le double conscience (Du Bois 1994), le démembrement et l'oubli, en outre, sa nécessité est également difficile à reconnaître en raison de la douleur, les traumatismes, les phénomènes de scission, les attitudes et les préférences d'évasion pour une captivité "confortable" .

En même temps, « re/membering » peut également être décrit comme plein d'espoir par la façon dont les auteurs eux-mêmes utilisent la littérature pour articuler l'identité à travers la recherche, le dialogue, la durée, la réconciliation et la re-création. Bien que laborieux et difficile, « re/membering » est important et nécessaire car ce qui est en jeu, c'est une identité culturelle articulée des Philippines. Mais qui serait prêt à l'effort?

Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Beaulé, Sophie. "L'institution de la science-fiction française, 1977-1983." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65469.

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Proietti, Salvatore. "The cyborg, cyberspace, and North American science fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0021/NQ44558.pdf.

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King, Edward Carlos Richard. "Mapping the control society : science fiction tropes and digital technologies in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian narrative." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610135.

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Oppelt, Riaan. "The valley trilogy: a reading of C. Loius Leipoldt's English-language fiction circa 1925-1935." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2007. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=etd&action=viewtitle&id=gen8Srv25Nme4_7246_1257247882.

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C. Louis Leipoldt is known as a canonical figure in the history of Afrikaans poetry, He is customarily included in the pantheon of writers such as C.J. Langenhoven who not only established Afrikaans as a standardized national language in the early twentieth century, but also contributed to the idea of the Afrikaner Volk as a distinct nation within South Africa. The recent publication of Leipoldt's Valley Trilogy, three novels written in English in the 1930's now reveals Leipoldt in a very different light. Today, in a time of national transformation, Leipoldt's liberal ideas deserve to be given the broader scope he had intended for them.

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Chan, Wing-chun Julia, and 陳永晉. "Towards an aesthetics of cliché: cultural recycling and contemporary fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2009. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B42182311.

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Masters, Benjamin Scott. "The ethics of excess : style and morality in British fiction since the 1960s." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648740.

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Leperlier, Henry. "Canadian science fiction, a reluctant genre." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0033/NQ61856.pdf.

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Jordan, Linda. "German science-fiction magazines of Hugo Gernsback, 1926-1935." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65493.

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Johnston, Susan 1964. "Calling the question : women and domestic experience in British political fictions, 1787-1869." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39928.

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This work challenges common arguments as to the division of the political from other fictional genres and, in treatments of nineteenth-century fiction and culture, the private from the public sphere. Through an examination of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Gaskell, I uncover a common concern with the preconditions of liberal selfhood which posits the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer, defined by interiority and mental qualities, comes to be. This rights-bearer is not, as has been argued, defined by purely formal and abstract procedural reason, but in terms of a capacity for reason which includes the capacity for emotion. This work therefore shows domestic space to be the foundation of, rather than the occluded counterpart to, the liberal polity, and argues that an account of the household, in which the liberal self is disclosed, is likewise at the centre of Victorian political fiction.

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Jorgensen, Darren J. "Science fiction and the sublime." University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2005. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2005.0116.

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[Truncated abstract] This thesis makes three assertions. The first is that the sublime is a principal pleasure of science fiction. The second is that the conditions for the emergence of both the sublime and science fiction lie in the modern developments of technology, mass economy and imperialism. Maritime and optical technologies; the imagination that accompanied imperialism; and the influence of capitalism furnished the cognition by which the pleasures of both science fiction and the sublime came into being. The third claim is that a historical conception of the sublime, one that changes according to the different circumstances in which it appears, offers privileged insights onto changes within the genre. To make such extensive claims it has been necessary to make a cognitive map of the development of both the sublime and science fiction. This map reaches from the Ancient Romans, Lucian and Longinus; to Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Johannes Kepler, Voltaire and Immanuel Kant; to Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. This thesis then examines how the features of these fictions mutate in the twentieth-century fiction of A.E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Ivan Yefremov, the Strugatsky brothers, J.G. Ballard, Pamela Zoline, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Ken MacLeod and Stanislaw Lem. These writers are considered in their own specific periods, and in their national contexts, as they create pleasures that are contingent upon changes to their own worlds. In representing these changes, their fictions defamiliarise the anxieties of the reading subject. They transcend the contradictions of their times with a sublime that betrays its own conditions of transcendence. The deployment of the sublime in these texts offers a moment of critical possibility, as it betrays the fantasies born of a subject's relation to their world

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Hill, Colin. "The modern-realist movement in English-Canadian fiction, 1919-1950." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19471.

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This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.

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Zheng, Baoxuan, and 鄭寶璇. "The theme of alienation in modern Chinese and Anglo-American fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1985. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31206803.

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Gevers, Nicholas David. "Mirrors of the past : versions of history in science fiction and fantasy." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/10511.

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The primary argument of this Thesis is that Science Fiction (SF) is a form of Historical Fiction, one which speculatively appropriates elements of the past in fulfilment of the ideological expectations of its genre readership. Chapter One presents this definition, reconciling it with some earlier definitions of SF and justifying it by means of a comparison between SF and the Historical Novel. Chapter One also identifies SF's three modes of historical appropriation (historical extension, imitation and modification) and the forms of fictive History these construct, including Future History and Alternate History; theories of history, and SF's own ideological changes over time, have helped shape the genre's varied borrowings from the past. Some works of Historical Fantasy share the characteristics of SF set out in Chapter One. The remaining Chapters analyse the textual products of SF's imitation and modification of history, i.e. Future and Alternate Histories. Chapter Two discusses various Future Histories completed or at least commenced before 1960, demonstrating their consistent optimism, their celebration of Science and of heroic individualism, and their tendency to resolve the cyclical pattern of history through an ideal linear simplification or 'theodicy'. Chapter Three shows the much greater ideological and technical diversity of Future Histories after 1960, their division into competing traditional (Libertarian), Posthistoric (pessimistic), and critical utopian categories, an indication of SF's increasing complexity and fragmentation.

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Ingham, Michael Anthony. "Theatre of storytelling : the prose fiction stage adaptation as social allegory in contemporary British drama /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B20275961.

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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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Moore, Richard. "Christianity and paganism in Victorian fiction." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683121.

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Johnson, Nancy E. (Nancy Edna) 1956. "The "equivocal spirit" of law : property, agency and the contract in the English Jacobin novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=29054.

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In the 1790s, the English Jacobin novelists became vital participants in the fiery debates over natural and civil rights. Energized by the success of the American Revolution and inspired by the calls for l'egalite, la liberte, la surete, and la propriete in France, the Jacobin authors contributed their narratives to the British campaigns for reform of parliament and extension of the franchise. In this dissertation, I argue that the Jacobin novel furnishes crucial insights into the development of a theory of juridical rights in the late eighteenth century. Working in the early modern traditions of contract theory, writers such as Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin embraced the concept of inalienable natural rights. In their novels, they identified the critical role property played in determining the individual's relationship to the law, and they celebrated the emergence of a new kind of citizen distinguished by economic independence, inalienable rights and political agency. But they also offered an important critique of contractarian thought. The Jacobins' narratives revealed the exclusion of certain segments of the population from participation in government formed by contract. Their analyses of the origins of political authority and the constitution of the legal subject render the Jacobin novel a critical component of the history of juridical rights.

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Dredge, Sarah. "Accommodating feminism : Victorian fiction and the nineteenth-century women's movement." Thesis, McGill University, 2000. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36917.

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The research field of this thesis is framed by the major political and legal women's movement campaigns from the 1840s to the 1870s: the debates over the Married Women's Property Act; over philanthropy and methods of addressing social ills; the campaign for professional opportunities for women, and the arguments surrounding women's suffrage. I address how these issues are considered and contextualised in major works of Victorian fiction: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871--2).
In works of fiction by women, concepts of social justice were not constrained by layers of legal abstraction and the obligatory political vocabulary of "disinterest." Contemporary fiction by women could thus offer some of the most developed articulations of women's changing expectations. This thesis demonstrates that the Victorian novel provides a distinct synthesis of, and contribution to, arguments grouped under the rubric of the "woman question." The novel offers a perspective on feminist politics in which conflicting social interests and demands can be played out, where ethical questions meet everyday life, and human relations have philosophical weight. Given women's traditional exclusion from the domain of legitimate (authoritative) speech, the novels of Gaskell, the Bronte's, and Eliot, traditionally admired for their portrayal of moral character, play a special role in giving voice to the key political issues of women's rights, entitlements, and interests. Evidence for the political content and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals. Central among these is the English Woman's Journal. Conceived as the mouthpiece of the early women's movement, the journal offers a valuable record of the feminist activity of the period. Though it has not been widely exploited, particularly in literary studies, detailed study of the journal reveals close parallels between the ideological commitments and concerns of the women's movement and novels by mid-Victorian women.

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Gossage, Ann. "Between the lines : the representation of Canadian women in English-language novels written by women in the 1930s." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=24085.

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This thesis examines the role of Canadian women as presented in English language novels of the 1930s written by women authors. Within the context of the Great Depression it focuses on issues that are central to women's daily lives such as work, love, marriage and motherhood. It also isolates recurring themes in the novels and attempts to understand the authors' messages within their social context. Social reform, politics and gender relationships are among the subjects explored.

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Nash, Andrew. "Kailyard, Scottish literary criticism, and the fiction of J.M. Barrie." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15199.

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This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.

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Williams, K. E. R. "Manifestations of the house in the Victorian ghost story." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2005. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/28032.

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The appearance of the ghostly is generally described as a manifestation, and to perceive the ghostly is predicated on the act of seeing. To be manifest is to be apparent, clear, evident and obvious and a manifestation is an act of revelation, even one of proof. The genre of the ghostly however is rarely truly seen in critical works, and the aim of this thesis is to engage with and explore the implications raised by the act of seeing within the tradition of the British ghost story. The appearance of the ghostly not only requires the acknowledgement of the existence of ‘the other’ by witnesses, but also actively prompts the viewer to see all that surrounds them in a wholly new way. With the focus firmly on the issue of seeing, this thesis seeks to examine to what extent the ghost story offers a different, and challenging, view of the rational world, and whether the ghost story is more than just an entertaining popular diversion and can actually, as Kenneth Womack suggests, operate as “a mechanism for social critique."

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Visel, Robin Ellen. "White Eve in the "petrified garden" : the colonial African heroine in the writing of Olive Schreiner, Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/29445.

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Olive Schreiner, writing in the tradition of George Eliot and the Brontës, was an isolated yet original figure who opened up new directions in women's fiction. In her novels, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) she developed a feminist critique of colonialism that was based on her own coming-of-age as a writer in South Africa. Schreiner's work inspired and influenced Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, who have pursued their visions of the colonial African heroine in changing forms which nevertheless consciously hark back to the "mother novel." Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937), Lessing's Martha Quest (1952) and Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953) are in a sense revisions of Schreiner's Story of an African Farm. These texts, together with later novels by Lessing and Gordimer (such as Shikasta and Burger's Daughter, 1979) and key short stories by the four writers, form a body of writing I call the "African Farm" texts. Written in different colonial countries—South Africa, Kenya and Rhodesia—in response to different historical circumstances, from different ideological and aesthetic stances, the "African Farm" fictions depict the problematic situation of the white African heroine who is alienated both from white colonial society and from black Africa. Through her own rebellion against patriarchal mores as she struggles to define herself as an artistic, intellectual woman in a hostile environment, she uncovers the connections between patriarchy and racism under colonialism. She begins to identify with the black Africans in their oppression and their incipient struggle for independence; however she cannot shed her white inheritance of privilege and guilt. Just as colonial society (the white "African Farm") becomes for her a desert, a cemetery, a false, barren, "petrified garden," so black Africa becomes its idealized counterpart: a fertile realm of harmony and possibility, the true Garden of Eden from which she, as White Eve, is exiled. I trace the "African Farm" theme and imagery through the work of other white Southern African writers, such as J.M. Coetzee, whose stark, poetic, postmodernist novels can be read as a coda to the realistic fiction of the four women writers. Finally, I look at the post-"African Farm" texts of such transitional writers as Bessie Head, whose novels of black Africa preserve a suggestive link with Schreiner.
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

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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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Heinimann, David. "A portrait of the young man as a failed artist /." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=66151.

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James, Sarah J. "Not without my body : feminist science fiction and embodied futures." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14613.

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This study explores the interaction between feminist science fiction and feminist theory, focusing on the body and embodiment. Specifically, it aims to demonstrate that feminist science fiction novels of the 1990s offer an excellent platform for exploring the critical theories of the body put forward by Judith Butler in particular, and other feminist/queer theorists in general. The thesis opens with a brief history of science fiction's depiction of the body and feminist science fiction's subversions and rewritings of this, as well as an overview of Judith Butler's theories relating to the body and embodiment. It then considers a wide range of feminist science fiction novels from the 1990s, focusing on four key areas; bodies materialised outside patriarchal systems in women-only or women-ruled worlds, alien bodies, cyborg bodies and bodies in cyberspace. An in-depth analysis of the selected texts reveals that they have important contributions to make to the consideration of bodies as they develop and expand the issues raised by theorists such as Butler, Elisabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

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Kwan, Wing-ki Koren, and 關詠琪. "Experiments in subjectivity: a study of postmodern science fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B3681250X.

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Sneddon, Sarah J. "The girls' school story : a re-reading." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14883.

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The very mention of the genre of the 'girls' school story' tends to provoke sniggers. Critics, teachers and librarians have combined throughout the century to attack a genre which encourages loyalty, hard work, team spirit, cleanliness and godliness. This dissertation asks why this attack took place and suggests one possible answer - the girls' school story was a radical and therefore feared genre. The thesis provides a brief history of the genre with reference to its connections with the Victorian novel and its peculiarly British status. Through examination of reading surveys, newspapers and early critical works it establishes both the popularity of the genre amongst its intended audience and the vitriolic nature of the attack against it. Biographical information about the writers of the school story begins to answer why the establishment may have been afraid of the influence of the purveyors of girls' school stories. By discussing their depiction of education, religion, women's roles and war the dissertation shows in what respects the genre can be seen as radical and shows how the increasing conventionality of the genre coincided with its decline in vigour and popularity. The influence of the oeuvre is then revealed in the discussion of its effects on adult literature.

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Balsom, Edwin James. "Dialogic regional voices, a study of selected contemporary Atlantic-Canadian fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0005/NQ42471.pdf.

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38

Shannon, Josephine E. "From discourse to the couch : the obscured self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary narrative." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34533.

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Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression.
I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.

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Zajac, Ronald J. (Ronald John). "The Dystopian city in British and US science fiction, 1960-1975 : urban chronotopes as models of historical closure." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61046.

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In much dystopian SF, the city models a society which represses the protagonist's sense of historical time, replacing it with a sense of "private" time affecting isolated individuals. This phenomenon appears in dystopian SF novels of 1960-75--including Thomas M. Disch's 334, John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit, Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, J. G. Ballard's High-Rise, and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren--as well as some precursors--including Wells, Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In these novels the cities also reveal in their chronotopic arrangement the degree to which revolutionary forces can oppose the dystopian order. While the earlier dystopias see revolution crushed by despotic state power, those of 1960-75 see it thwarted by the dehumanizing effects of capitalism. The period from 1960-75 ends in resignation to an existence in which individual action can no longer effect political change, at best tempered by irony (Disch, Delany).

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McFarlane, Anna M. "A gestalt approach to the science fiction novels of William Gibson." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6263.

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Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler argue that human perception relies on a form, or gestalt, into which perceptions are assimilated. Gestalt theory has been applied to the visual arts by Rudolf Arnheim and to literature by Wolfgang Iser. My original contribution to knowledge is to use gestalt theory to perform literary criticism, an approach that highlights the importance of perception in William Gibson's novels and the impact of this emphasis on posthumanism and science fiction studies. Science fiction addresses the problem of difference and the relationship between self and other. Gestalt literary criticism takes perception as the interface between the self and the other, the human and the inhuman. Gibson's work is of particular interest as his early novels are representative of 1980s cyberpunk while his later novels push the boundaries of science fiction through their contemporary settings. By engaging with Gibson the thesis makes its contribution to contemporary science fiction criticism explicit. In Gibson's Sprawl trilogy autopoiesis defines life and consciousness, elevating the importance of perception (Chapter I). The Bridge trilogy uses the metaphor of chaos theory to examine dialectic tensions, such as the tension between space and cyberspace (Chapter II). Faulty pattern recognition is a key theme in Gibson's post-9/11 work as gestalt perception allows and limits knowledge (Chapter III). Chapter IV explains how the gestalt in psychoanalysis creates a fragmented subject in Spook Country (2007). Finally, the gestalt appears as a parallax view, a view that oscillates between the world we experience and the world as represented in the text (Chapter V). I conclude that gestalt literary criticism offers an exciting new reading of Gibson's work that recognises its engagement with visual culture and cyberpunk as a whole.

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Bechtel, Lawrence Reid. ""A question of relationship": the flower of consciousness in the fiction of D.H. Lawrence." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/90910.

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An unusual sensitivity to nature and an exceptional power of transforming that sensitivity into artistic expression are among the most frequently remarked traits of D.H. Lawrence's genius. But few critics have examined the individual phenomena so transformed. This study makes an effort to correct that neglect by focusing on Lawrence's treatment of flowers in his fiction. Daniel Stiffler has opened the way with his dissertation, "'Say It With Flowers': A Study of Floral Imagery in the Novels of D. H. Lawrence," but much work can still be done. Because Lawrence conceived of the flower as "the most perfect expression of life" and believed with Ursula Brangwen that art is "only the truth about the real world," my emphasis is upon Lawrence's fictional flowers as representatives of his philosophy of life, a philosophy of complementary opposites. Arguing that the female aspect of his philosophy is the "root" of unconscious awareness and that the male aspect is the "blossom" of language or "verbal consciousness," I describe the flower as a perfect expression of the union between the female and male aspects of life. But because such union is never fully achieved, the flowers in Lawrence's fiction demonstrate the dynamic tension between the female and male aspects, as they approach a moment of balance. Though H. M. Daleski argues that Lawrence's fiction records a struggle to heal the "breach" in his own nature as the "male principle" within himself separated from the more intrinsic "female principle," I try to demonstrate that Daleski's description is simplistic and that the very character of the flower as a symbolic model indicates that Lawrence's consciousness was by nature perennially growing away from itself, withering back to its "root" source, and then growing outward once more.
M. Eng.

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42

Tam, Ho-leung Adrian, and 譚灝樑. "Realism, death and the novel: policing and doctoring in the nineteenth century." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B41757828.

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Lee, Jason Eng Hun. "'All is not Well in the world' : critical cosmopolitanism in twenty-first century fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/197089.

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This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative ‘worlds’; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader. The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists’ attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11’s images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers’ capacity for imagining global connectedness. Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one’s ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate ‘worlds’, and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time.
published_or_final_version
English
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy

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44

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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Gasiorek, Andrew B. P. (Andrew Boguslaw Peter). "A crisis of metanarratives : realism and innovation in the contemporary English novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74280.

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Critics of the English novel, arguing that it is underpinned by liberalism, frequently claim that the crisis of realism disclosed in the work of many contemporary writers derives from a concomitant crisis of liberalism. Liberalism's dissolution is thus seen to prefigure the death of the novel. This dissertation contends that realism cannot be equated with liberalism and that the contemporary crisis of representation signals a broader crisis of metanarratives.
Focussing on selected novels of five post-war English novelists--B. S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, and Angus Wilson--I argue that their different responses to the crisis of representation show that it is not a crisis of liberalism alone. Johnson rejects realism for epistemological reasons; Lessing and Berger question it on political grounds; Murdoch and Wilson combine its strengths with a self-reflexive awareness of its weaknesses. I suggest that Murdoch's and Wilson's novels, which argue that fiction does not reflect reality but endows it with meaning and which are at once representational and metafictional, offer the most fruitful ways of acknowledging the crisis of representation while refusing to be paralyzed by it.

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Eckstein, Simon J. "The shadow of the past : fantasy, modernism, and the aftermath of a world at war." Thesis, Swansea University, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678625.

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This study constitutes a single strand of a wider argument for a thorough-going reassessment of the place of fantasy literature within the canon. In particular, it aims to redress a marked lack of critical attention paid to the distinct movement towards fantastic modes of representation in the mid-twentieth century.

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Anandan, Prathim. "Child/subject : children as sites of postcolonial subjectivity and subjection in post-Independence South Asian fiction in English." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711768.

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Wakota, John. "The making and remaking of gender relations in Tanzanian fiction." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86389.

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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study examines the fictional representation of gender relations in novels set during five historical periods in Tanzania – the pre-colonial, colonial, nationalism, Ujamaa, and the current neoliberalism period – each of which is marked by important shifts in the nation’s economic contours. Analysing novels written in both Swahili and English, it tracks the shifts in fictionalized household and extra-household gender relations; analyses how the community and the state (colonial and post-colonial) variously map and remap the way male and female characters relate; and interrogates how male and female characters variously accommodate, appropriate, bargain with and/or resist the shifts. The study employs the concepts of power and intersectionality to analyse how selected authors depict gender relations as a product of intersecting identity categories, complex socio-economic shifts and historical processes. Defining labour as productive work done for wage and fulfilment of gender roles, the study argues that labour is one of the major aspects shaping power relations between men and women. It reveals that labour is the major aspect in which the economic shifts have had great impact on gender relations as represented in Tanzanian fiction. As an aspect of power, labour is also the area within which gender relations have continuously been negotiated and contested throughout the fictionalized history. In negotiating or resisting given economic shifts, both male and female characters variously deconstruct and or endorse existing notions of power, labour, and gender relations. The study shows that the cross-fertilization among the periods, the interaction between gender and other identity categories (such as race, religion, class, and age), the synergy between indigenous patriarchy and other patriarchies (such as colonial and capitalist), and, the interactions between global and local dynamics account for the complex and contradictory nature of the shifts in gender relations throughout the nation’s history. Consequently, the study’s major observation is that across the fictionalized history, characters variously seek to maintain and or transform existing gender relations and or discard or restore past gender relations.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Dié studie ondersoek die fiksionele verteenwoordiging van geslagsverhoudings in romans wat gestel word gedurende vyf historiese periodes in Tanzanië – pre-koloniale, koloniale, nasionalisties, Ujamaa en die huidige neoliberalisme – elkeen waarvan gekenmerk is deur belangrike verskuiwings in die nasie se ekonomiese kontoere. Deur die analisering van romans wat in Engels en Swahili geskryf is volg dit die verskuiwings in fiktiewe huishouding- en ekstrahuishoudelike geslagsverhoudings; dit analiseer hoe die gemeenskap en die staat (koloniale en post-koloniale) die manier van hoe manlike en vroulike karakters verband hou verskillend en afwisselend kaart en herkaart; dit interrogeer hoe manlike en vroulike karakters verskillend die verskuiwings akkommodeer, bewillig en weerstaan. Die studie maak gebruik van die konsepte van krag en intersektionaliteit om te analiseer hoe die geselekteerde skrywers geslagsverhoudings verteenwoordig as ŉ produk van kruisende identiteitskategorieë, komplekse sosio-ekonomiese verskuiwings en historiese prosesse. Arbeid word as produktiewe werk wat gedoen word vir loon en geslagsrolle definieer, en die studie argumenteer dat arbeid een van die hoof aspekte is wat magsverhoudings bepaal tussen mans en vrouens. Dit onthul dat arbeid die hoof aspek is in die ekonomiese verskuiwings wat ŉ groot impak gehad het in geslagsverhoudings in Tanzaniese fiksie. As ŉ aspek van mag is dit ook die area waarin geslagsverhouding aanmekaar onderhandel en betwis word dwarsdeur die fiktiewe geskiedenis. Wanneer dit kom by die onderhandel en twis van ekonomiese verskuiwings is dit beide manlike en vroulike karakters wat afwisselend bestaande idees van mag, arbeid en geslagsverhoudings dekonstrueer en endosseer. Die studie bewys dat kruisbestuiwing tussen die periodes, die interaksies tussen geslag en ander identiteitskategorieë (soos ras, geloof, klas en ouderdom), die sinergie tussen patriargie en ander patriargies (soos koloniale en kapitalistiese) en die interaksies tussen globale en plaaslike dinamika verantwoordelik is vir die komplekse en teenstrydige natuur van die wisselinge in geslagsverhoudings regdeur die nasie se geskiedenis. Gevolglik is die studie se hoofobservasie dat die karakters regdeur die geskiedenis op verskeie maniere poog om bestaande geslagsverhoudings te behou of te transformeer of om vorige geslagsverhoudings te herstel of verwyder.

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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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Ahern, Stephen. "Between duty and desire : sentimental agency in British prose fiction of the later eighteenth century." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0027/NQ50101.pdf.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Science fiction, English – History and criticism'

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