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White depictions of Aborigines in literature have generally been culturally biased. In this study I explore four depictions of Indigenous Australians by white Australian writers. Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) depicts a half-caste Aborigine's attempt to enter white society in a racially-antipathetic world that precipitates his ruin. Children's author Colin Thiele develops friendships between white and Aboriginal children in frightening and dangerous landscapes in both Storm Boy (1963) and Fire in the Stone (1973). Nobel laureate Patrick White sets A Fringe of Leaves (1976) in a world in which Ellen Roxburgh's quest for freedom comes only through her captivity by the Aborigines. I use whiteness and masculinity studies as theoretical frameworks in my analysis of these depictions. As invisibility and ordinariness are endemic to white and masculine actions, interrogating these ideological constructions aids in facilitating a better awareness of the racialized stereotypes that exist in Indigenous representations.

During the Great War, poetry played a more significant role in the war effort than articles and pamphlets. A campaign of extraordinary language filled with abstract and spiritualized words and phrases concealed the realities of the War. Archaic language and lofty phrases hid the horrible truth of modern mechanical warfare. The majority and most recognized and admired poets, including those who served on the front and knew firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, not only supported the war effort, but also encouraged its continuation. For the majority of the poets, the rejection of the war was a postwar phenomenon. From the trenches, leading Great War poets; Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Sitwell, and others, learned that the War was neither Agincourt, nor the playing fields of ancient public schools, nor the supreme test of valor but, instead, the modern industrial world in miniature, surely, the modern world at its most horrifying.

The nineteenth century critics appraised Shakespeare's heroines by standards different from those of the twentieth; consequently the two ages reached different conclusions. The purpose of this paper is to point out just what these differences are. A paper of this scope had to be narrowed in some ways. Otherwise a formidable array of heroines would have been enumerated, but little depth of research could have been shown. In the general conclusion the result would have been the same, as I have discovered through wide reading. To limit the subject only the most famous heroines could be included. The process of assembling a bibliography on the field of criticism of Shakespeare's heroines showed that some heroines bad been fully discussed, while others had been given little in the way of criticism. A great mass of material on a certain heroine, for example, would show that, since she was considered important by many writers of a certain period, she should be given consideration in this discussion. In this way the number of heroines discussed in this paper was limited to seven: Portia (in Merchant of Venice), Rosalind, Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona, Cleopatra, and Lady Macbeth.

<p>This study focuses on two incarnations of the Cenci legend: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 verse drama <em>The Cenci</em> and George Elliott Clarke and James Rolfe’s 1998 chamber opera <em>Beatrice Chancy</em>. Shelley composed <em>The Cenci</em> after he discovered an Italian manuscript recounting the life of Beatrice Cenci who, after being raped by her father, plotted the murder of the debauched patriarch and was subsequently executed for parricide. Nearly two centuries later, Clarke and Rolfe created <em>Beatrice Chancy</em>, an Africadianized adaptation of the Cenci legend inspired by Shelley’s play. This study investigates they way in which multiple performance genres re-embody history in order to contest collective memory and reconfigure concepts of nationhood and citizenship. It examines the principles of nineteenth-century closet drama and the way in which Shelley's play questions systems of despotic, patriarchal power by raising issues of speech and silence, public and private. This is followed by a consideration of how Clarke and Rolfe's transcultural adaptation uncovers similar issues in Canadian history, where discourses of domestic abuse come to reflect public constructs of citizenship. Particularly this study examines how, through the immediacy of operatic performance and the powerful voice of the diva, <em>Beatrice Chancy</em> contests Canada’s systematic silencing of a violent history of slavery and oppression.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis seeks to interrogate how Elie Wiesel’s <em>Night</em> and A. M. Klein’s <em>The Second Scroll</em> illustrate the spiritual journeys of their protagonists and depict dehumanization of the Jewish people. Through their interactions with sacred bodies, as well as profane, religious and sacred objects, both novels map the spiritual quests of the protagonists, revealing very different conclusions. Using Virginia Greene’s “‘Accessories of Holiness’: Defining Jewish Sacred Objects” as an analytic framework, I explore how both novels transform sacred bodies into profane “objects” to illustrate various forms of anti-Semitic subjugation and de-personification. I then interrogate how <em>The Second Scroll</em> “textualizes” these objectified bodies, as well as how Klein’s novel turns Israeli society into a sacred text. This “textualization” offers a space to re-affirm God’s providence in a post-Holocaust imagination—an imagination that strongly differs from the rejection of God in <em>Night</em>. Through this exploration of spirituality and dehumanization, both texts humanize those who have been dehumanized in the camps and re-face the victims whose personhood was stripped from them, inviting them to dwell in both the novels and the readers’ memory.</p> / Master of English

<p>In this thesis, I explore the manner in which loneliness has been presented culturally, scientifically, politically, and academically as the asocial antithesis of happiness. I suggest lonely people are presented throughout these discourses as misfits, trapped by their lonely feelings and in danger of entrapping others. I further put forth that the impetus to understand and promote a conception of loneliness as depressive and alienating is politically inflected, strengthening neoliberal models of sociality that rely upon particular notions of good citizenship. As a consequence, Western scientific, academic, and cultural discourses continue to reinforce particular brands of “productive” intimacy (heterosexual, middle/upper class, able-bodied, white, monogamous partnerships), while strategically policing the lonely person’s presumed immaturity, negativity, and illegibility.</p> <p>The thesis begins by considering how recent scientific studies are lodged in evolutionary models, with the implication that they position loneliness as an abnormal and dangerous setback to Western sociability and its progress. As a corollary, I demonstrate that contemporary cultural narratives such as Dan Savage's "It Gets Better Project" that have surfaced in order to address queer, teen suicide, bullying, and violence tend to frame loneliness as a degenerate feeling that warrants survivalist tactics and adaptations away from queerness. In scientific and cultural discourses alike, then, loneliness has become stuck onto queer subjects and can only be understood as a condition that infects a sub-set of weak and vulnerable subjects. Judged for their seeming narcissistic and unhappy tendencies, queer sexualities come to be considered dangerous and contagious, and lonely queer bodies are being represented in scientific, cultural, and social media narrativizations as the reason for a larger, Western failed happiness.</p> <p>The body of the thesis deepens and extends these concerns by analyzing the marked tension between the figurative language that speaks of loneliness as a pathology and an (a)political desire for selfish individualism. I suggest that in light of the current failures of Western sociality what is needed is a space for an understanding of the everydayness of loneliness and its potential to be political. Drawing on critical work on affective politics, this thesis makes a space for the lonely queers among us. Focusing attention on four key areas— the science of loneliness, lesbian narcissism, childhood sexuality, and queer disability—I argue that loneliness is neither an exceptional trauma, nor is it extraordinary: rather, it is every subject’s inheritance. By envisioning loneliness as possibly pleasurable as much as it is traumatic, and by seeing the act of declaring oneself lonely as a political strategy, I argue that we may be encouraged to re-evaluate the ways in which we experience relationality, human empathy, and sociality. Moreover, our shared loneliness as Western subjects may actually have the potential to rupture the rigidity of societal paradigms (sexism, ableism, classism, racism, and homophobia) that are based upon exclusion, upward mobility, and capital gain.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>In my dissertation, I advance an interpretive perspective that emerges from the politics of the Mad Movement (also known as the Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/Ex-patient Movement). This movement began in the 1970s in response to patient abuses in the psychiatric system and continues today in various forms. I argue that literary studies, which often reads madness in the reductive terms of psychiatric diagnosis or which renders madness as metaphor, would benefit from mad perspectives; likewise, literary studies has much to offer the nascent field of Mad(ness) Studies in terms of methods for locating the discursive conditions of madness’ emergence. Drawing on Foucault’s work on madness and biopolitics; poststructuralist feminism; Disability Studies; and Mad Movement writings, I concentrate on texts which narrate intersecting experiences of madness, resistance, community and identity: Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit (1947), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1994), Claire Allen’s Poppy Shakespeare (2007), Liz Kettle’s Broken Biscuits (2007), Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me (2010), Persimmon Blackbridge’s Prozac Highway (2000), Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985) and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2004). I further explore mad reading practices through my reading of a blog project I conducted for research purposes in which people with experience of the mental health system reviewed depictions of madness and mental health treatment in literature, film, popular culture and news media. In reading through a mad perspective, I postulate some of the material and ideological effects that establishing mad reading practices and communities might have. I consider how madness is gendered, and how it intersects with other aspects of embodiment such as race, class and sexuality; how narratives of madness elucidate the relationship between psychiatry and colonialism, patriarchy, eugenics and neoliberalism; and how they invite us to question the limits of reason, truth and subjectivity.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This project is an exploration of 20th century dystopian literature through the lens of germ theory. This scientific principle, which emerged in the late 19th century, asserts that microorganisms pervade the world; these invisible and omnipresent germs cause specific diseases which are often life threatening. Additionally, germ theory states that vaccines and antiseptics can prevent some of these afflictions and that antibiotics can treat others. This concept of a pervasive, invisible, infection-causing other is not just a biological principle, though; in this paper, I argue that one can interpret it as an ideological framework for understanding human existence as a whole. Particularly, I believe that authors of prominent 20th century dystopian novels applied the tenets of germ theory in order to explore the potential “pathogens” that furtively exist within the human mind. These pseudo-germs are various human tendencies that, when left “untreated” by governments, create nonnormative members of society. In the eyes of dystopian regimes, it is precisely this nonnormativity that poses a lethal threat, in that it challenges the continued existence of society with the current ruling body at the helm. In this paper, I trace love (both sexual and familial) and individuation (as a function of social hierarchy, recreational activities, and the use of language) as social disease-causing pathogens in George Orwell’s 1984 and in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

"Quare Contestations: Bridging Queer, Lesbian, and Feminist Narratives of the Irish Diaspora" examines three sets of biographical and autobiographical narratives about Irish who migrated to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Dwelling primarily in queer studies and diaspora studies, this thesis participates in the construction of a queer Irish diaspora archive by analyzing the spaces of overlap between Irish queer, feminist, and lesbian - together, quare - theory and lived experience in these narratives. In my analysis, I demonstrate the fluidity, movement, and interdisciplinary scope of a quare framework for approaching studies of gender and sexuality in the Irish diaspora context. This thesis intervenes into the work already being done to queer Irish diaspora by examining the contestations of "Irishness" appearing in the narratives that are analyzed, and by in turn contesting and complicating the action and meanings made by "queer" in the existing archive of queer Irish diaspora literature.