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Sexing The Fairy Tale: Borrowed Monsters And Postmodern Fantasies, Romayne Chaloner Fullerton
Sexing The Fairy Tale: Borrowed Monsters And Postmodern Fantasies, Romayne Chaloner Fullerton
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines the ambiguous function of folk and fairy tale motifs in the postmodern fantasies of Angela Carter, Jenny Diski, and Jeanette Winterson. Whereas the most popular and widely-read versions of the classic tales tended to focus on woman as passive victim, these texts present woman as powerful monster: she is a witch, a giant, a step- or adoptive parent, or is only half human. But these postmodern incarnations are often problematic because they are largely borrowed from earlier stories which are sexist, misogynistic, and narrow in their outlooks. While woman's construction as monstrous is neither constant nor unqualified, …
"The Rhythm Of The Visible World": Music, Text And Performance In Selected Writings Of Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein And Virginia Woolf, Gyllian Phillips
"The Rhythm Of The Visible World": Music, Text And Performance In Selected Writings Of Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein And Virginia Woolf, Gyllian Phillips
Digitized Theses
This study examines the presence of musical innovations in the language of individual works of Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. Facade, Four Saints in Three Acts, and Between the Acts, all use the techniques of transformative musical forms in their own literary disruption in conventional forms. These works reveal an interaction between musical forms and literary forms, whether analogous (as in Between the Acts) or literal (Facade and Four Saints in Three Acts) the experiment of music in writing and the location of literary experiment by women writers generally in a historical context. For these writers, the ephemeral …
Dennis Lee And George Grant: Technology And Reverence, Margaret Joan Roffey
Dennis Lee And George Grant: Technology And Reverence, Margaret Joan Roffey
Digitized Theses
This study focuses on poet Dennis Lee's reading of one of his chief influences, George Grant. It notes the affinity in their understanding of the nature and cost of "technology," and highlights their points of disagreement.;For both Lee and Grant, the most deleterious effect of technological domination is the loss of a sense of the holy, a disabling of the human capacity for reverence and justice. Lee parts company from Grant, however, in his account of the holy. Lee tends to characterize the holy in Heideggerian and mystical terms, as an experience of awe unmediated by the things and creatures …
The Dialectic Of Orality And Literacy In "Piers Plowman", John Paul Wooden
The Dialectic Of Orality And Literacy In "Piers Plowman", John Paul Wooden
Digitized Theses
This dissertation argues that in writing Piers Plowman Langland was attempting something extraordinarily difficult: to negotiate between two poles of authority, bardic and clerical, and in so doing to create something not quite of either pole, a literary tertium quid, a remarkable hybrid of the discourses and values associated with oral and written culture. In contrast the many studies that focus on the clerical bias of the poet, I demonstrate that Langland writes not only as a clerk, bearer of the cultural authority of the book, but also as a traditional seer, speaking of and for an oral culture that …
"The Impossible Voice": Hermeneutics And Narrative In Samuel Beckett's Novels, Jonathan Stuart Boulter
"The Impossible Voice": Hermeneutics And Narrative In Samuel Beckett's Novels, Jonathan Stuart Boulter
Digitized Theses
Samuel Beckett's early to middle novels thematize what Gadamer calls the hermeneutic nature of being. The novels figure the process of being as articulating the non-coincidental self in a discursive space itself denying the very grounds of meaning. This dissertation explores the philosophical implications of an aporetic hermeneutics in relation to the narrating subject, whose readings of his world are always articulated en abime, and to the actual reader, who is obligated to measure the economy of her own reading against the specular hermeneutic of the narrating subject. The question of interpretation in the novels is attenuated by the reader's …
The Lie Of The Land: Regionalism, Environmental Determinism, And The Criticism Of Canadian Prairie Writing, Alison Claire Calder
The Lie Of The Land: Regionalism, Environmental Determinism, And The Criticism Of Canadian Prairie Writing, Alison Claire Calder
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines how critics have constructed literary regionalism in Canada, with particular attention to the treatment of writings from the prairie provinces. Nationalist critics have generated and controlled a critical discourse which either defines regionalism pejoratively and in ways that make it inherently regressive, or that universalizes regionalism to such an extent; that it has only metaphorical value. Critics have thus constructed a non-political regionalism; works from the regions which do not fit this description are excluded from "regional" categorization. This narrow definition is particularly evident in the construction of writings from the Canadian prairies, as the belief in …
"Such Peple As Be Not Letterd In Scripture": Popular Devotion And The Legend Of St Katherine Of Alexandria In Late Medieval England, Jacqueline Jenkins
"Such Peple As Be Not Letterd In Scripture": Popular Devotion And The Legend Of St Katherine Of Alexandria In Late Medieval England, Jacqueline Jenkins
Digitized Theses
This dissertation examines four different versions of the Legend of St. Katherine of Alexandria in Middle English in the context of laywomen's reading patterns in the late Middle Ages. The questions considered in the discussions of the individual texts or manuscript collections include: why was the legend of St. Katherine so influential and important in the Middle Ages, how does her cult accommodate the changing patterns of lay spirituality in the fifteenth century, and what function did the hagiographic literature and the other devotional texts with which they circulated, fulfill in the lives of the laywomen readers with whom they …
La Voix Enfantine De L'Apres-60: Refus Du Double Normatif, Recherche Du Double Marginal, Marie-Diane Tuyet-Mai Clarke
La Voix Enfantine De L'Apres-60: Refus Du Double Normatif, Recherche Du Double Marginal, Marie-Diane Tuyet-Mai Clarke
Digitized Theses
Notre these vise a examiner les romans de l'enfance de l'apres-60, de France et du Quebec, qui representent la dialectique enfant/adulte, et parallelement celle qui oppose le personnel et le social, le marginal et l'ideologie dominante. Les ouvrages qui font plus precisement l'objet de cette etude sont ceux ou le conflit vecu par un narrateur enfant est inscrit dans la trame thematique et structurelle du texte, qui sont tout entiers paradigmes d'une impossibilite relationnelle. Ils mettent en scene un affrontement entre le regard despotique de l'autre et les tentatives de recuperation de soi, entre les paroles mensongeres de l'adulte et …
Commitment And Utopia: A Liberation Theology Approach To John Dos Passos, Flannery O'Connor, And Thomas Pynchon, James William Horton
Commitment And Utopia: A Liberation Theology Approach To John Dos Passos, Flannery O'Connor, And Thomas Pynchon, James William Horton
Digitized Theses
My intent in this work is to see what consequences can be derived from looking from the perspective of Christianity (especially, liberation theology) at three very different writers: John Dos Passos, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon. Having taken this stance, I will be viewing one major work of each of these three writers as work which deals with the nature of human commitment and its relationship to a stated or implied utopia. My intention is to perform a religious and ideological reading of the three authors, and to see what the implications are of liberation theology for literature in an …
"Two Kinds Of Geography": Complicity And Resistance In Canadian Pioneer Literature, Gillian Heather Siddall
"Two Kinds Of Geography": Complicity And Resistance In Canadian Pioneer Literature, Gillian Heather Siddall
Digitized Theses
The purpose of this thesis is to consider the Canadian wilderness as an actual and a mythological site for discursive change. Part One analyses five pioneer journal/handbooks, and Part Two examines four contemporary texts which focus on the pioneer experience.;Chapters One to Three explore the extent to which the disruption of their political and social assumptions caused the female pioneers to explore alternative constructions of gender. These chapters illustrate that the women do indeed see the potential in the wilderness for redefining themselves, for shifting away from the restrictive nineteenth-century construction of women. This shift comes in part from their …
The Victorian Prima Donna In Literature And The Ghosts Of Opera Past, Grace Lynn Kehler
The Victorian Prima Donna In Literature And The Ghosts Of Opera Past, Grace Lynn Kehler
Digitized Theses
This dissertation explores the non-disjunction between eighteenth-century discourses on the early opera and the castrato and nineteenth-century discourses on the prima donna. Early opera was predicated on a series of fissures, particularly those between ideal and popular art, between a transcendent voice and a mutilated body, and between the supernatural and the unnatural. Officially, these fissures served to demarcate oppositions, but opera, from its inception, was drawn to transgression, and the fissures were crossed and recrossed, alternately endowing the castrato with transcendence and abjection. Paradoxically, then, one of the pivotal concepts in the construction of the castrato is the immanence …
Other Frontiers: Female Vagrants And Mother Outlaws In American Literature And Film Of The 1980s, Jacqui Marie Smyth
Other Frontiers: Female Vagrants And Mother Outlaws In American Literature And Film Of The 1980s, Jacqui Marie Smyth
Digitized Theses
The thesis examines female vagrant and outlaw figures in a selection of fictional texts produced in the 1980s. Using the idea of vagrancy in their characterizations of female protagonists, these texts revise persisting assumptions about women that are inherent in American culture. Beginning with a discussion of the reasons why women have been excluded, at least theoretically and ideologically, from a culture based on mobility, the thesis then considers two dominant and interrelated discourses in the American imagination--those of the frontier and of the myth of home--which are inescapable in any discussion of the American female outlaw and/or vagrant. This …
Shakespeare's Concepts Of The Future In The Tetralogies, John David Hartley
Shakespeare's Concepts Of The Future In The Tetralogies, John David Hartley
Digitized Theses
This thesis attempts to demonstrate that Shakespeare's conceptions of the future develop in complexity and coherence in the tetralogies and are important to readings of the plays as an indication of his developing sense of historical change. I approach the plays from a modified cultural materialist viewpoint. This critical approach offers useful presuppositions and a strategy for analysis of characterization and ideological issues that assist in understanding how the future takes shape in the plays.;Shakespeare includes a number of factors other than characterization and ideological issues that help to shape the future--fate, Providence, prophecies, dreams, and images. His concepts of …
"Sodomitical Practices": Representing Transgressive Masculinity In Fiction And Satire, 1660-1750, Cameron Mcfarlane
"Sodomitical Practices": Representing Transgressive Masculinity In Fiction And Satire, 1660-1750, Cameron Mcfarlane
Digitized Theses
This study examines the representation of the sodomite in a variety of texts from 1660 to 1750. Unlike most gay historiography of the Restoration and eighteenth century, the study does not begin with the assumption that the increased discursive presence of the sodomite during this period necessarily indicates the emergence of a proto-modern "homosexual" identity; rather, it seeks to uncover the range of meanings set in motion by the figure of the sodomite and to examine the way that the representation of this figure is implicated in the larger configurations of social ordering and control. At the same time, however, …
Heterological Rhetoric: Textual Waste In "The Anatomy Of Melancholy", Robert Grant Williams
Heterological Rhetoric: Textual Waste In "The Anatomy Of Melancholy", Robert Grant Williams
Digitized Theses
This dissertation argues that Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy generates unmanageable rhetoric or what I call textual waste. Whereas many premodern systems take as their fundamental template the classical body and, therefore, methodically exclude from their homogeneous, functional field the heterogeneous, The Anatomy challenges the integrity of Renaissance systematicity by disfiguring and abjecting the classical body. Examining the complex correlations between medical and rhetorical discourses, economies concerned with regulating a system, this study demonstrates how Burton deviates from a rhetorical economy that handles the text as if each part efficiently functioned in an overall corporeal order. The Anatomy is …
"A Territory Not Yet On The Map": Relocating Gay Aestheticism In The Age Of Aids, John David White
"A Territory Not Yet On The Map": Relocating Gay Aestheticism In The Age Of Aids, John David White
Digitized Theses
Critical and artistic responses to the AIDS epidemic emerged simultaneously in the mid 1980s, and informed each other over the contested ground of "official" AIDS discourses. As these responses were initially defined, two positions emerged: aestheticism and activism. This study focuses on aestheticism but does so in the context of activism and suggests similarities between the two positions. In my analysis of the literary representations, I focus my attention on the works of Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Robert Ferro, and Paul Monette, writers who first came to prominence in the 1970s before the epidemic and who have written on the …
Economies Of Desire: Reading Between Toni Morrison And William Faulkner, Nancy Ellen Batty
Economies Of Desire: Reading Between Toni Morrison And William Faulkner, Nancy Ellen Batty
Digitized Theses
Since the 1970 publication of Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, her work has not only inspired critical praise for its unique portrayal of African-American life, it has also consistently evoked comparison to the work of William Faulkner. While Morrison studied Faulkner in college and wrote her Master's thesis on Faulkner and Woolf, she has repeatedly denied Faulkner's influence, claiming instead a strong affinity between her work and that of other black women writers and African-American cultural forms. As a white southern male writer whose novels are primarily about white southern culture, William Faulkner does seem an unlikely progenitor …
L'Evolution Du Sentiment Religieux Dans Les Contes De Charles Nodier: A La Recherche De La Reconciliation Interieure (French Text), Maura G. Dube
L'Evolution Du Sentiment Religieux Dans Les Contes De Charles Nodier: A La Recherche De La Reconciliation Interieure (French Text), Maura G. Dube
Digitized Theses
En partant des recits de jeunesse dans Les Tristes (1806) et en allant jusqu'au dernier conte Franciscus Columna (1843), cette dissertation trace l'evolution du sentiment religieux dans trente-huit contes de Charles Nodier. Profondement romantique, le sentiment religieux chez Nodier est intimement lie au besoin de reconcilier le monde materiel et l'aspiration au paradis perdu. L'oeuvre de la jeunesse, comme aussi celle de la maturite et de la vieillesse, se definit en effet par une tentative de retour aux origines caracteristique de l'homo religiosus d'apres Mircea Eliade.;Il est donc possible de reperer certaines "constantes" dans les contes de Nodier. Par exemple, …
From Ritual To Rocket: "Gravity's Rainbow" In The Apocalyptic Tradition (Thomas Pynchon), David Joseph Robson
From Ritual To Rocket: "Gravity's Rainbow" In The Apocalyptic Tradition (Thomas Pynchon), David Joseph Robson
Digitized Theses
This thesis situates Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) in the Apocalyptic tradition. In constructing this tradition I have employed the critical theories--or critical visions--of Northrop Frye, Mircea Eliade, and of the "Toronto School" of communication theorists: Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and Walter Ong. Ong's conception of the "technologizing of the word" provides the unifying theme of this thesis, a theme which I extend into the postmodern context where it manifests itself in Pynchon's Rocket/Word.;The first chapter examines the way in which pre-literate oral cultures, Hesiod, Plato, Herodotus, and Thucydides are apocalyptic or anti-apocalyptic. The second chapter focuses on the Bible, …
The Presence Of James Joyce In The Poetry And Prose Of A M Klein, Harold Heft
The Presence Of James Joyce In The Poetry And Prose Of A M Klein, Harold Heft
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines the details of A. M. Klein's interest in James Joyce, as well as Joyce's effect on Klein's major works. Klein's fascination with Joyce's literary innovations is apparent in almost every aspect of his literary career, and there is evidence to suggest that Klein's involvement with Joyce's writing spans almost his entire career as a writer. Klein's attraction to Joyce's writing stimulated his artistic development, and his attempts to write critical essays on Joyce's novel Ulysses ultimately drew him away from his creative writing.;In Chapter 1, the available information on Klein's involvement in Joyce studies is presented in …
La Femme Dans Le Monde Imaginaire De Georges Bernanos, Astrid Heyer
La Femme Dans Le Monde Imaginaire De Georges Bernanos, Astrid Heyer
Digitized Theses
This thesis undertakes a chronological survey of the role of women in Georges Bernanos' imaginary world. Beginning with his first youthful attempts at short stories in 1907, it analyzes the author's complete fictional writings. This systematic study traces a growing preoccupation with women characters as the author's fictional universe evolves.;Indeed, all three of Bernanos' mature short stories ("Madame Dargent", "Une nuit", "Dialogue d'ombres") revolve around women. Four of his eight novels (La Joie, Un Crime, Un Mauvais reve and Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette) are also dominated by heroines rather than male protagonists. The place of women in his last fictional …
Constructions Of Anarchism In British Fiction, 1885-1914, Noel Patrick Peacock
Constructions Of Anarchism In British Fiction, 1885-1914, Noel Patrick Peacock
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines constructions of anarchism in selected fiction published in Britain between 1885 and 1914. It does so in the larger context of ideological constructions of anarchism within late-Victorian and Edwardian media, popular and literary culture. It also makes use, particularly in its first two chapters, of the work of M. M. Bakhtin, through whom it understands the novel as dialogizing these cultural ideologies.;Chapter One documents the emergence of what I call an anarchist typology, or collection of stereotypes of anarchists and anarchism that indicates a late nineteenth century anxiety about the possibility of revolution. It traces the meaning …
The Politics Of Defamiliarization In Blake's Printed Works, Julia Margaret Wright
The Politics Of Defamiliarization In Blake's Printed Works, Julia Margaret Wright
Digitized Theses
The works of William Blake are notoriously strange. Multimedia artifacts with stylized illustrations and texts that have unusual forms and proper names, they evade the limits of the familiar. But such an evasion is not simply aesthetic. For Blake, the familiar world is entangled in a web of false paradigms that, whether formal or political, alienate individuals from their proper selves. "Familiarity" is an apparently innocuous term that masks easy distinctions between what is proper and what is alien--distinctions that delineate everything from genres to nations and so place invisible, but effective, limits on what can be said and, more …
Characterization In Selected Novels Of Pierre Loti: Seafolk And The Sea, Allan James Wilton
Characterization In Selected Novels Of Pierre Loti: Seafolk And The Sea, Allan James Wilton
Digitized Theses
Captain Julien Viaud served France in la Marine nationale for forty-two years; however, he is perhaps better known by his literary pseudonym: Pierre Loti de l'Academie francaise. Throughout most of his life this reporter, sailor and author recorded a detailed account of his personal activities, adventures and voyages around the world in his Journal intime. These records provided source material for more than fifty publications, including novels, about the sea.;It is widely accepted that there is significant autobiographical content in many of Loti's fictional writings: his own experiences as a sailor were transcribed into his diaries which in turn were …
Virginia Woolf As Subject In Biography And Autobiography, Susan Rita Braley
Virginia Woolf As Subject In Biography And Autobiography, Susan Rita Braley
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines the biographies of Virginia Woolf written between 1941 (the year of her death) and the present, focusing first on the myriad of identities constructed for Woolf by biographers and then on the concepts of subjectivity which Woolf herself presents in autobiographical works.;Although contemporary biographical and autobiographical theorists agree that the authentic self is impossible to locate or inscribe, early biographers of Woolf sought to establish a unitary identity for their subject. Aileen Pippett begins this tradition by presenting Woolf as a literary icon to be worshipped from afar; Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell, while continuing to celebrate …
Memorable Acts/Active Rememberers: Contemporary Canadian Memory Plays, Karen Joy Grandy
Memorable Acts/Active Rememberers: Contemporary Canadian Memory Plays, Karen Joy Grandy
Digitized Theses
In Narrative as Performance, Marie MacLean refers to "the age-old relationship between drama and prose narrative whereby each is the alter-ego of the other" (15). This thesis examines a literary subgenre in which those alter-egos are brought face to face: the memory play. The memory play defies traditional genre definitions. It combines drama's immediacy with narrative's retrospection; drama's chronology with narrative's re-ordering; drama's a-perspective with narrative's focalization; drama's showing with narrative's telling. The unusual coalition of mimesis and diegesis provides an excellent forum in which to explore memory. What does the past, personal and communal, mean to us--and how do …
La Metamorphose De La Narration Orale Dans Les Recits De Panait Istrati, Mariana Carmen Ionescu
La Metamorphose De La Narration Orale Dans Les Recits De Panait Istrati, Mariana Carmen Ionescu
Digitized Theses
Cette etude se developpe a partir d'une hypothese avancee par Paul Zumthor, a savoir que dans les cultures plus profondement ancrees dans une traditon orale, celle-ci oriente l'ecriture et la lecture d'un grand nombre de textes litteraires (La Lettre et la voix, 1987: 243).;Pour verifier la validite de cette hypothese, nous avons choisi comme texte d'analyse les premiers recits de Panait Istrati, ecrivain francais d'origine roumaine qui a publie son cycle romanesque intitule Les Recits d'Adrien Zograffi entre 1924 et 1935.;Notre attention s'est concentree sur les volumes Kyra Kyralina (1924), Oncle Anghel (1924), Presentation des haidoucs (1925) et Domnitza de …
Radical Possibilities: Literature In The English Revolution, 1640-1660, Brian Leonard Patton
Radical Possibilities: Literature In The English Revolution, 1640-1660, Brian Leonard Patton
Digitized Theses
This dissertation explores the circulation of radical social and political ideas in the literature of the 1640-1660 Revolution, when England's most fundamental institutions, from the monarchy to the patriarchal family, appeared in danger of annihilation. For students of literature, the period is so rich that its relative neglect seems remarkable. A lapse in government control over the nation's printing presses resulted in a veritable explosion of books, pamphlets and broadsides, and a literature that offers an unprecedented diversity of views and voices. Surveying a wide range of texts, from the familiar to the lesser-known, my study draws upon insights gleaned …
The Divided Text: Intertextual Ambivalence In Timothy Findley's Novels, Anne Elizabeth Bailey
The Divided Text: Intertextual Ambivalence In Timothy Findley's Novels, Anne Elizabeth Bailey
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines the ambiguous function of intertexts within Timothy Findley's novels. His fiction is in constant dialogue with other literary texts and conventions as well as numerous social, economic, and political discourses. This intertextual dialogue politicizes Findley's work because the re-presentation of intertexts often subverts and challenges ideological biases, revealing sexist, racist, and totalitarian features. However, the repetition of intertexts not only implies difference but also similarity, a paradox which creates ambiguity within Findley's novels. I propose that this ambivalence is evident in both the form and content of Findley's work, arguing that the relationship between his own texts …
Meaning And Matricide: Reading Woolf Via Kristeva, Miglena I. Nikolchina
Meaning And Matricide: Reading Woolf Via Kristeva, Miglena I. Nikolchina
Digitized Theses
The thesis examines the psychoanalytic myth of matricide in its relevance for a feminist understanding of literary history. The first half of the dissertation explores the problem of matricide in the terms offered by Kristeva's theory. My study emphasizes the larger context of Kristeva's work which is not confined to Freud and Lacan only; the effects of its cultural substratum involving such diverse traits as Byzantine iconograpy, East Orthodox dogma, and Bulgarian language and folklore; and the implications of its form as a "polylogue"--i.e. a transmutation of Bakhtin's polyphonic novel into a theory conscious of its fictional and semiotic dimensions.;In …