Katherine Mansfield among the Moderns examines Katherine Mansfield’s relationship with three fellow writers: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, and appraises her impact on their writing. Drawing on the literary and the personal relationships between the aforementioned, and on letters, diaries, and journals, this project traces Mansfield’s interactions with her contemporaries, providing a richer and more dynamic portrait of Mansfield’s place within modernism than usually recognized. Hitherto, critical work has not scrutinized Mansfield in the manner I suggest: attending to representations of her as a character in other’s work, while analyzing the degree to which her influence on the aforementioned authors affected their writing and success. Albeit, her influence extends in vastly different ways, and is affected by gender and nationality. While Woolf’s early foray into Modernism is accelerated by Mansfield’s criticism of her work, several of Woolf’s texts – “Kew Gardens,” Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway – are similar in certain respects to Mansfield’s work – “Bliss” and “The Garden Party.” A repudiation of Mansfield, personally, and a retelling of her work are seen in Lawrence’s The Lost Girl and Women in Love. Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point, contain characterizations of Mansfield that undermine her writing, and her person: both are affected by the mythical misrepresentation of Mansfield, created by Murry after her death, known as the “Cult of Mansfield.” Using Life Writing, this study asserts that Mansfield had impact on the writing of Woolf, Lawrence, and Huxley. Taking into account the many issues that surround the recognition of this, among them: gender politics, colonialism, marginality by genre, and personal relations – these all, to varying degrees, prevented critics from acknowledging that a minor modernist author played a role in the undisputed success of three major authors of the twentieth century.

A comparison of the writings of Plato and C.S. Lewis reveals a common idea that human love is not sufficient for man. An examination of Plato’s Symposium and Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and The Four Loves, in particular, shows that both writers illustrate that man must ascend the ladder of love in order to meet the source of all love: Divine Love. Concerned with man’s innate needs and ethics, both Plato and Lewis argue that there is a universal principle of goodness known to all men of all cultures. Lewis argues, especially in The Abolition of Man, that man must cling to the traditional notion that a sense of right and wrong is inherent in all men. Illustrated in the measurably modified version of the Cupid and Psyche myth retold in Till We Have Faces, Lewis reveals that man’s natural relationships cannot satisfy his yearning for the union with beauty and truth found only in a supernatural relationship with Divine Love: God. Similar to Plato’s thought recorded in his dialogues, Lewis projects in most of his writings the argument that man cannot find the good life until he seeks the virtuous life that leads to harmony with men and joy found in the presence of God.

The development of the novel cannot be separated from discussions about literary history, gender relations, performance, and the power literature has to instruct its audience. Women and young people have always comprised a substantial part of the novel’s readership, and this makes them powerful. The history of the novel is the history of dangerous literature; it is the history of works that have enchanted readers with “the power of example,” as Samuel Johnson wrote in the eighteenth century, that can lead them to change their behavior. This thesis explores how women in young adult literature—in the eighteenth century through Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and today through Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008)—use performance and vision to reveal and resist the social systems that try to define them. Evelina and Katniss, the heroines of these novels, provide their readers with examples of behaving in ways different than the normative model. Their stories, and the young women who read their stories, threaten the established social order of their worlds. The creative addition to this thesis provides readers with another young heroine who uses her powers, in a fantastical world, to reveal and resist the structures in her life.

This thesis explores South African author K Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) as a narration of personal and national trauma. This narration of trauma, as a disruption of the past in the present, provides insight to an imagination of recursive temporality. Through the temporal insights trauma introduces, it understands a shared history which is outside of modern, linear progression, a history which is always happening, not needing to prove itself but begging to be witnessed. It is this imagination of a collective, recursive history which translates, in the text, towards a decidedly decolonial witnessing.

Jane Austen’s novels remain an essential component of the literary canon, but her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, is frequently neglected. However, in Sense and Sensibility is the genesis of Austen’s technique through which her major characters cultivate and reveal a strong inner life, demonstrated through the character of Elinor Dashwood. This technique is a characteristic she incorporates in each of her succeeding novels. Her approach to literature centers on the interiority of her characters and their ability to change, but it her first novel Austen takes a unique approach. Following the structure of an eighteenth-century sermon, Austen creates a sermon for lay people that centers on the cultivation of a strong interior life.

The social sciences have developed robust bodies of scholarship on expertise and professionalism, yet literary analyses of the two remain comparatively sparse. I address this gap in Boundaries of Knowledge by examining recent Anglophone fiction and showing that expertise and professionalism are central concerns of contemporary authors, both as subject matter in fiction and in their public identities. I argue that the novelists studied use and abuse expertise and professionalism: they critique professions as participant observers, and also borrow the mantle of expert credibility to bolster their own cultural capital while documenting the pitfalls of expertise in their fiction. My first chapter shows how acquired technical knowledge and professionalism are the central concerns of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In the novel, Henry Perowne’s professionalism is the site from which various ethical and political debates radiate. Perowne—depicted as a rather heroic expert in comparison to the other novels studied in the dissertation—is disturbed by a total outsider in the form of Baxter, a man with no prospects or future, professional or otherwise. McEwan aligns himself more closely with Perowne: in part through extensive research for Saturday, he has developed a reputation as a public figure who straddles the “two cultures” of the sciences and humanities, a reputation that exists in a synergistic relationship with his particular brand of realist fiction, which emphasizes hard work and professional credibility. Next, I demonstrate how Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reveals a deep suspicion of academia, which in the novel serves to cut disciplinary experts off both from the world outside campus and from an appreciation of the subjects they study. Smith’s academic professionals are well-intentioned but unable to look beyond field-specific boundaries to appreciate their objects of study (and unintentionally harm outsiders along the way). Larger issues such as race are always present but at the margins of the interpersonal drama that plays out between the novel’s numerous characters. I read Smith herself as reluctantly accepting academic life, teaching at New York University while maintaining a qualified distance from American academia in articles and interviews. Chapters one and two are broadly about the advantages and drawbacks of expert knowledge, respectively. In my third chapter, Abdulrazak Gurnah offers the most circumspect view of experts yet with a fear of a “summarizing” expert or colonizer of knowledge that is only resolved by the arrival of a more authentic Zanzibari expert. In an analysis of Gurnah’s By the Sea, I show how professional networks--the United Kingdom’s immigration and refugee system, the colonial education system in Zanzibar, and the professoriate--raise questions about who is entitled to and capable of narrating people’s lives. These questions dovetail both with the novel’s shifting narrative form and with the concerns of Gurnah’s own work as a scholar of literature. Beginning with McEwan and ending with Gurnah, Boundaries of Knowledge travels from the most socially and economically secure, elite experts to those left behind by contemporary professionalism. My title reflects this troubled landscape of expert knowledge and professionalism: who knows what, the benefits and drawbacks of the accompanying cultural capital, and the barriers between various fields, sets of knowledge, and finally people.

The purpose of this thesis was to explore selected works from William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats, in order to expose textual instances of feminist thought. This analysis was aided with feminist theorists falling under the main strains of queer theory, materialism, and gender performance. Specifically, this thesis focused on the ways in which women, particularly virgin daughters, were viewed as property by their male kin. It also looked at how these women engaged in various symbolic masquerades and/or actual cross-dressing as a response to the aforementioned phenomenon. Finally, the thesis exposed how these masquerades can be construed as a queering of identity—manifested through reversals of power and rejection of patriarchal institutions like marriage.

Irony and satire in two of James Joyce's works.

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In order to contribute to the body of work on Bolingbroke and on Shakespeare's development of character, this thesis examines various rhetorical and stylistic methods used by Shakespeare in his creation of the character of Henry Bolingbroke.