Browsing Department of English Literature Graduate Theses by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 109
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Adult Readers and the Growing "New Girl" in Major American Girls' Fiction, 1900-1920
The early twentieth century was a time of high-profile commentary in the U.S. regarding new roles for women, the convention-defying “New Woman,” and adolescence in the context of girls’ lives. Girls’ fiction included ... -
“Affection wondrous sensible”: Locating Affect in Shakespeare’s Comedies
This dissertation reads three Shakespearean comedies, The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, through the mutually illuminating perspectives of early modern theories of the passions, mid-twentieth ... -
Agape and Emancipation: The Common Good in Recent Postcolonial Fiction
(2015-05-26)In this dissertation, I argue that there is a tendency in postcolonial studies to equate injustice with a lack of knowledge. The political task for postcolonial studies is then framed in pedagogical terms: to provide the ... -
Aging Ungracefully: Transgressive Femininity on the Eighteenth-Century Stage
This dissertation analyzes how negative conceptions of aging are weaponized against the bodies of female players in the eighteenth century, particularly when players are engaging in behaviour that society deems transgressive ... -
Amorous Ex/Incursions: Love in Writings of Badiou, Weil, Fromm, and Barthes
(2011-08-09)My dissertation explores the enabling contributions of love to the practice of ethico-political and cultural critique. Engaging with the work of Alain Badiou, Simone Weil, Erich Fromm, and Roland Barthes, I examine love ... -
Animals, Animality, and Violence: Reading Across Species in J. M. Coetzee's Writing
(2013-06-12)This thesis examines the writings of Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee in order to explore pressing issues that have emerged in literary, philosophical, and theoretical approaches to animal studies. These include animals as ... -
Approaching Anxiety: Reading Eden Robinson in an Era of Reconciliation
This project seeks to account for the ways in which Anglo-settler anxiety has influenced the construction of the mythos of a benevolent Canadian national identity. I argue that settler anxiety toward Indigeneity is the ... -
Aspects of Intimacy: Authority and Integrity in the Modernist Novel
In the following thesis I strive to offer renewed ways of construing “one’s own,” authority, integrity, and intimacy as literary themes, and appropriate form, provisional tonality, and approximate, inexhaustible address ... -
Author of Prodigies: Representing the Female Letter-Writer in English Renaissance Literature
(2008-12-16)This dissertation seeks to show that the figure of the female letter-writer in English Renaissance literature, rather than reflecting the culture’s desire to contain, undermine, or destroy the notion of women’s textual ... -
The Author's Farce: Satiric Agency, Authority, and the Performance of Eighteenth-Century Satire on Film and the Stage
(2016-01-18)This dissertation investigates how dramatic performance affects satire, its forms of authorisation, adaptation, and interpretation. Focusing on Restoration and eighteenth-century dramatic satires and film adaptations of ... -
Authority, Communication and Discrimination in Agency Models
This thesis develops three theoretical frameworks to investigate questions relating to authority within both firms and governments as well as discrimination in the labor market. The first chapter develops a theoretical ... -
The Beloved and Other Monsters: Biopolitics and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Literature
(2015-12-16)This dissertation examines the use of inter-racial relationships as emblems of political reconciliation in South African fiction from and about the transition from apartheid to democracy. Positive representations of the ... -
"The Black Imprint of Sandals in White Mosaic Floors": H.D.'s Mythomystical Poetics
(2011-09-01)My dissertation examines the traces of inverse (mytho)mysticism, more synchronous with mythical alchemy than transcendent mystery, in H.D.’s mature work (1946-1961). Whereas H.D.’s earliest works respond to a fin de siècle ... -
Bracketing Off, Dashing Away: Unruly Punctuation in A.A. Milne’s A Table Near the Band
I argue that Milne uses the diacritical marks of parentheses and dashes, and the asides they denote, to destabilize the written page in his short-story collection A Table Near the Band. Parentheticals produce this ... -
Breaking New Ground: The First Generation of Women to Work as Professional Authors in English Canada (1880-1920)
(2011-10-15)In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, large numbers of Canadian women were stepping out of the shadows of private life and into the public world of work and political action. ... -
British Romantic Criticism and the Fine Arts: A Study in Philosophical Theories of Literary Unity
(2016-09-28)This dissertation is an exploration of how a small but important group of Romantic critics, finding fault in the ideal of three unities developed by neoclassical Academicians and wrongly attributed to Aristotle, turned to ... -
Bystander Narratives: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee and the Holocaust
(2011-09-30)J.M. Coetzee’s novels are suffused with a pervasive, though often oblique, Holocaust awareness. Direct references to the event and to the historical era to which it belongs, subtle stylistic and thematic echoes of Holocaust ... -
"The Camera Cannot Lie": Photography and the Pacific Non-Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson (1888-1894)
(2014-04-07)This archivally-based dissertation re-contextualizes Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Pacific photographic collection (1888-1894), situating it in relation to his incomplete and posthumously published anthropological study ... -
Caribbean Immigrants in Relationship: Tracing the Transnational Connections between Austin Clarke and Samuel Selvon
(2016-03-30)Austin Clarke and Samuel Selvon are similarly positioned in the literary field and offer overlapping perspectives in their depictions of Caribbean immigrants, yet for the most part, there has been no in-depth comparison ... -
The Characterization of Monstrous Femininity in the Testament of Cresseid and the Awnytrs off Arthure
(2009-09-02)This dissertation uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the similar portrayals of monstrous femininity in two Middle English poems, Robert Henryson’s the Testament of Cresseid and the Awntyrs off Arthure. In the Testament, ...