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

Nostalgic Metafiction: The Adventure Fiction Of Stevenson, Kipling, And Conrad, Hanji Lee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A sense of nostalgia for real adventure is ubiquitous in the adventure fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. While many scholars consider the object of the writers’ nostalgia to be the exploratory age of the British Empire before her massive territorial expansion in 1890s, I argue that there is a missing piece in the current critical understanding of nostalgia: its textual dimension. Nostalgia in my texts is more than a historical longing for the youthful days of the Empire; it is a textual longing for the ideal adventure as imagined and constructed by the previous generation …

Terrorism, Islamization, And Human Rights: How Post 9/11 Pakistani English Literature Speaks To The World, Shazia Sadaf

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The start of the twenty-first century has witnessed a simultaneous rise of three areas of scholarly interest: 9/11 literature, human rights discourse, and War on Terror studies. The resulting intersections between literature and human rights, foregrounded by an overarching narrative of terror, have led to a new area of interdisciplinary enquiry broadly classed under human rights literature, at the point of the convergence of which lies the idea of human empathy. Concurrently with the development of human rights literature as a distinct field of study, two new strains of Pakistani literature have emerged on the Anglophone literary scene. Firstly, there …

Let Me Tell You What It Means: Reading Beyond Humor In Selected Iranian-American Memoirs, Stand-Up Comedy, And Film In The Post-9/11 Era, Reza Ashouri Talooki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

ABSTRACT

Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Muslims in America have continued to remain the subject of cultural and political debates. In their artistic endeavours, Muslim artists have tried to rectify the negative and mediated images attributed to Islam, Muslims, and their cultures. In this dissertation, I look at Iranian works from the diaspora that not only represent Iranian culture and attempt to raise public awareness in America, but also extensively wade into humor as their linking theme. It is humor embedded in socio-cultural and political implications along with cultural representations that constitute my analysis in this dissertation. …

Representing Modern Female Villain: On Feminine Evil, Perverse Nationhood, And Opposition In Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Barbara Guerrero

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to contribute to the scholarship on modern female villainy by further exploring the ways in which 20^th century female villains are represented as well as the functions they carry out in the text. In this study, I look at Rómulo Gallegos’ doña Bárbara from Doña Bárbara (1929) and Salman Rushdie’s Indira Gandhi from Midnight’s Children (1981). I argue that both villains are a combination of already-existing forms of evil in more recognizable contexts as well as a rejection of and opposition to modern values. Firstly, I examine how the villains both conform and resist the formula …

Food Figures At The Forks: The Intersection Of Feminist And (Post)Colonial Politics Of Food Imagery In Kiran Desai’S The Inheritance Of Loss, Maryam Golafshani

2016 Undergraduate Awards

In Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, Anita Mannur argues that food offers ‘an alternative register through which to theorize gender, sexuality, class, and race’ in literature by and about the South Asian diaspora. The use of food in these texts is not merely a figurative flourish, but rather an ‘important vector of critical analysis in negotiating the gendered, racialized, and classed bases of collective and individual identity’ of South Asian bodies. Food is always already political; it must not merely be tasted, but must be read in terms of how it (re)presents and (re)produces intersecting power differentials. …

About Telling: Ghosts And Hauntings In Contemporary Drama And Poetry, Leif Erik Schenstead-Harris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It is difficult to think of something as formally resistant to definition as a ghost. What is more ambiguous than something described as “haunting”? Few currents in literature have been as prominent – and as comparatively unremarked – as the current critical and literary dependence on the language of spectrality. While ghost stories in prose have gained substantial attention, in drama and poetry ghosts and hauntings have found less critical purchase.

In response, this dissertation takes up a selection of drama and poetry from Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean to illustrate the theoretical and critical potential of ghosts and …

Dr. Balachandra Rajan: From India To Canada, Fragments In Search Of A Narrative - In Memoriam, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

A heartfelt memorial piece for Dr. Balachandra Rajan, an Indian diplomat and poetic scholar, written by Teresa Hubel.

Introduction:

While preparing to write this tribute to Dr. Balachandra Rajan, I found myself wondering what in his eminent life I should be recalling for your benefit. Which events or personal preferences, habits, gestures, or even political commitments and publications can be tallied up to create some kind of coherent narrative that conveys the gist of him? The dilemma is that, when it comes to Dr. Rajan (who in my memory can never be remembered as anyone other than Dr. Rajan, not …

In Search Of The British Indian In British India: White Orphans, Kipling’S Kim, And Class In Colonial India, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

Contemporary scholars struggling to keep their work politically meaningful and efficacious often, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad of race, gender and class. But though this three-part mantra is persistently and even passionately recited, usually in the introductory paragraphs of a scholarly piece, ‘attentive listening,’ as historian Douglas M. Peers asserts, ‘reveals that class is sounded with little more than a whisper’ (825). Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, …

"The Bride Of His Country": Love, Marriage, And The Imperialist Paradox In The Indian Fiction Of Sara Jeannette Duncan And Rudyard Kipling, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

For many literary scholars and general readers, the expression 'Kipling's India' neatly delineates the imperialist society that existed on the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. The phrase, however, is deceptive in its simplicity. It does not reveal, or even imply, the internal workings behind what is certainly a vast imaginative construct, a construct that involves a specific political ideology, various cultural myths, and an extraordinary emotional investment. In the words of one critic, Kipling was "a mythmaker for a culture under protracted stress" (Wurgaft xx). He voiced the bewilderment and memorialized the tragic — and sometimes pathetic …