Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

Representations Of Class, Social Realism And Region In "Eleven Months In Bunbury" By James Ricks, Joshua J. K. Ledger

Theses : Honours

The aim of this thesis is to explore representations of class, social realism and region in Eleven months in Bunbury by James Ricks. This novel stands outside dominant literary theory in its representations of class, realism and regionalism. It also presents opportunities to consider ideology and class through the eyes of a working class person, in the language of the class that it depicts. Thus it speaks to a class which rarely has its point of view and lives represented in conventional literature. It is therefore a useful literary and social document.

Jack Maggs : A Differend Convict(Ion) By Peter Carey, Timothy D. Langley

Theses : Honours

This thesis is an analysis of Peter Carey's novel Jack Maggs and its attempt at writing back to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. I will analyse the (de)construction of language games between Jack Maggs and Great Expectations; show how Carey as a post-colonial settler writer writes back to the centre, to Dickens' text as a canonical Victorian novel, through intergrating the very notion of the Victorian novel, and in his own terms giving the convict a "history". I will explore how Carey writes competing language games of "science" and "narrative" (as identified by Lyotard) within Jack Maggs and how they produce …

Fantasy Woman: The Quest For Feminine Subjectivity In D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, Christopher Palmer

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

.

Nene Gare, A Biographical Study: Australian Novelist, 1919-1994, Rosina Squarcini

Theses : Honours

This thesis undertakes an introductory biographical study of Australian writer, Nene Gare, and a critical reading of her work with special reference to The Fringe Dwellers. The author of this study has sought to establish the basis for that novel's positive literary reception. The research has been directed at correcting, in part, the comparative neglect of this writer. Nene Gare's life and work has been surveyed in the belief that this study will contribute to the current knowledge of twentieth-century Australian fiction writers as well as showing the critical reception to Nene Gare's work as a part of Australian …

The Sacrifice Of Les Murray, Jill Reading

Theses : Honours

Les Murray's vivid and evocative poetry has made him a major Australian literary figure. Critics routinely note the sophisticated, often highly wrought nature of Murray's poetic language and acclaim his technical virtuosity, including gifts for pun, paradox, aphorism, idiom and metaphor. The themes of both Murray's poetry and his non-fiction prose often revolve around the divisions he sees in Australia between cultures, between society and people, and within individuals themselves. Despite his efforts to bring healing to these schisms, however, the poet is criticised for his frequent dogmatism and didacticism, which mark his work as divisive. Although Murray professes to …

Invoking The Darkness: Thematic Unification Via Druidic Context In William Butler Yeats' The Secret Rose, Amy Marciano

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

.

A Cave Of Their Own: A Comparative Examination Of Recurring Social And Psychological Themes In Gothic Fiction And Gothic Youth Subculture Through The Song Lyrics And Fiction Of Nick Cave, Bradley M. Hunter

Theses : Honours

The aim of this thesis is to examine the Gothic phenomenon as it pertains to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century fiction, and extrapolate its social and psychological concerns as they relate to the Gothic revival in the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement and late twentieth-century gothic subculture. This examination focuses on recurrent social and psychological themes in eighteenth/nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement and twentieth-century gothic music and subculture, which, in turn, are compared to the themes and motifs of the song lyrics and fiction of Nick Cave. Within this context, the recurring theme of the psychological exploration of …

An Investigation Of Dominant Ideologies Operating Within The Text Historia By Australian Playwright Noëlle Janaczewska, Nicole G. Kelly

Theses : Honours

The 'reality' of contemporary Australia is based upon hegemonic perceptions of society, which categorise and classify subjects and groups. These perceptions are based upon dominant ideologies that make sense of and order the world in a particular way. Where 'minority' groups are concerned, their experience, their way of life and their way of 'being' is seen to deviate from the hegemonic perception; they don't fit into the dominant ideology and are therefore constituted as 'different', which through Western polarisation sees them marginalised as the 'Other' seen as somehow more deviant than those who fit the dominant ideology. Noelle Janaczewska's play …

Migrant Woman As 'Undecidable' : Migrant Subjectivity, The Crocodile Fury By Beth Yahp And The Mule's Foal By Fontini Epanomitis, Sally Cloake

Theses : Honours

In this thesis I demonstrate how a notion of decentred subjectivity better describes marginal subject positions than the concept of unified subjectivity which depends on a discriminatory binary conceptualisation. I identify the migrant position as an aporia from which to deconstruct such concepts as unified subjectivity, as the migrant refuses classification according to dichotomous structures. I use Derridean metaphors to show the falseness and unexamined essentialism inherent in binary oppositions. I use a combination of theorists, and especially Helime Cixous, to augment my primarily Derridean reading of migrant subjectivity within the texts: The Crocodile Fury by Beth Yahp and The …

The Emergence Of Voice And Identity In The Context Of The Neocolonial Experience: The Writings Of Jamaica Kincaid, Kirstin Ruth Bratt

Culminating Projects in English

Jamaica Kincaid's novels Annie John and Lucy demonstrate a marked resistance to Western philosophy and the British literary canon. The writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Patricia Hill Collins provide useful frameworks for viewing Kincaid's work. Ngugi's metaphor of "moving the centre," combined with Hill Collins' theories of Black feminism are both useful in examining the issues of voice and identity in the neo-colonial experience.

Critics have attempted to identify Kincaid's work as either coming-of-age, pre-oedipal narrative, feminist, or autobiographical. While these categories can also be useful in reading Kincaid's work, they are also limited in their ability to define …

Speaking Magic Realism: Selected Short Stories Of Peter Carey, Raymond Driehuis

Theses : Honours

This thesis is an analysis determined by the investigative proposition, what is a magic realist speech act? Of the schools of thought available to any philosophical undertaking in literature, this thesis makes particular use of the principles of speech act theory, genre theory, and poststructuralism. With genre theory, the emphasis is on the subgeneric construction of the narrative structure, and this thesis will incorporate three short stories from Peter Carey's The Fat Man in History as the most overt evidence for what the thesis is proposing to analyse and illuminate. But on the whole, readers will understand that, while …

Fractured Certainties: Epistemology And Ontology In David Malouf's Child's Play, The Great World And Remembering Babylon, Chris Lyon

Theses : Honours

This thesis is an exploration of the way in which David Malouf develops ideas of epistemology and ontology in three of his novels. The novels discussed are Child's Play (1982), The Great World (1990) and Remembering Babylon (1993). Of particular concern here are the different ways in which figures in the text are constructed as having imperfect and sometimes contradictory systems of making sense of their world.

Ratbags On The Fringe: Exploring Feminism Through Crime, Danielle Brown

Theses : Honours

This dissertation considers how feminist crime fiction, can transform a traditionally male dominated genre. Contemporary feminist crime writers reject the codified masculine crime genre to create ever-expanding spaces for literary representation. I concentrate on three texts which are ordered as a progression. Firstly, I explore the conservative "male." writing of Jennifer Rowe in The Makeover Murders. I then go on to The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender by Marele Day which privileges a concern with the socio-political position of women and their access to socio-political power. The last text, Finola Moorhead's Still Murder, is a radical work of feminist …

"And The Woman Is A Stranger": The Double-Voiced Discourse In Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea And Voyage In The Dark, Hsiao-Chien Lee

Masters Theses

As the daughter of an English father, Jean Rhys inherited from her father and his sister the assertion that England was her motherland. On the other hand, growing up in Dominica which is inhabited mostly by African-Caribbean people, and surrounded by black servants--some of whom were her childhood playmates, Rhys naturally identifies herself with blacks. In her unfinished autobiography (Smile Please 1979), Rhys points out that she used to envy black people, feeling that they laugh a lot and seem to have a better time than whites do. Nevertheless, the problematic tensions of colonial and postcolonial society obstructed the …

Tied To Tradition: The Silenced Rage Of The African Woman In Selected Novels Of Buchi Emechata, Marie Giselle Martine Raphael

Theses : Honours

In addressing the myths of past and present social and familial structures and hierarchies. Post-Colonial Literatures are forced to confront complex assertions of identity, evolved through an inheritance shaped by both traditional and foreign influence. In a study of Buchi Emecheta' s novels, The Slave Girl, The Joys of Motherhood and Second Class Citizen, a tension is thus seen to emerge within the African heroine, between “her communally bred sense of herself as an African, and her feminist aspirations for autonomy and self-realization as a woman" (Frank, 1987, 45). Though the female protagonists of these narratives are placed within different …

Robbery Under Arms And Power Relations In Rolf Boldrewood's Colonial Australia, Kevin James Mclean

Theses : Honours

No abstract provided.

The Pursuit Of Fulfilment: Desire In Peter Carey's Illywhacker, Jonas Byford

Theses : Honours

This paper is a close textual analysis exploring the different levels at which desire is manifest in Peter Carey's lllywhacker. It attempts to show how desire, and the expectation of its fulfilment, have the effect of propelling the narrative and implicating the reader in the text. It is also the aim of the paper to argue that, despite aU Ilfywhacker's gestures to the contrary. and its expectation of fulfilment, at no level is this desire realized in the novel. It should be stated that this is not an evaluative judgement...

Postmodernist Writings, Realist Readings: Peter Carey's Bliss And The Tax Inspector, Antonio Jose Dos Santos Simoes Da Silva

Theses : Honours

No abstract provided.