Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-274).

This study examines four historical novels written by authors from former or existing British colonies, exploring the works' activist potential, that is, their ability to function as more than just escapist reading. The novels' publication dates range over the last two hundred years, allowing the study to investigate changes in how authors use language and structure as tools to raise issues about how history is recorded. After a discussion of the origins and potential cultural work of historical fiction in general, the four novels are discussed in terms of how their styles and structures work to exclude or include certain audiences.The earliest two novels in this study, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), perform and complicate exclusion, reclaiming history by (among other things) taking possession of the language of conquest, English, and using it to push to the periphery the former (or presumptive) rulers of that language and the power associated with its use. Each novel employs a disempowered character who uses a non-standard, hybridized form of English to narrate the story. The editorial apparatus of each novel, which includes prefaces, glossaries, and footnotes, is examined in terms of how it impacts readers' reactions and comprehensionThe two contemporary novels, J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1992), in addition to displaying the formerly silenced perspectives of Others and then enacting their erasure, employ intertextual referencing as a method of exclusion. Each novel's structure uses narrative reiteration as a method for raising questions about perspective and historical truth. Historical novels have been an important tool in generating a cohesive national consciousness in many nations over the past two hundred years. This study investigates how they can also be used to provide alternatives to that monolithic sense of the past when they depict and enact exclusion. / Department of English

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Murdoch University, 2006. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [137]-146).

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / The eras of colonial expansion and the era designated the modern have been both chronologically and philosophically linked from the commencement of the Renaissance period and Enlightenment thought in the 15th century. The discovery of the New World in 1492 gave impetus to a new type of literature, the colonial novel. Throughout the development of this genre, in both its narrative strategies and the depiction of the colonist’s relationship with the foreign land he now inhabits, it has been both informed and formed by the prevailing philosophical atmosphere of the time. In the context of this discussion it is particularly interesting to note what might be termed the level of regression of the modern ideal, and how it is reflected in the colonial novels written at the time. Commencing with the essentially optimistic Robinson Crusoe and The Coral Island, and progressing through the far darker imaginings of Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, and eventually Apocalypse Now and Blood Meridian, it is possible to trace the effects of the declining power of Enlightenment thought. Whereas earlier texts deal quite unambiguously with the issue of the Western subject’s subjugation of both the foreign environment and the foreign subjects he encounters there, and the relation between subject and object remains quite uncomplicated, in later, more self-reflexive texts the modern subject’s relationship with both the alien land and alien people becomes far more problematic. Later texts such as Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies depict a world where the self-assurance of early texts is strikingly absent. Increasingly, as the initial self-confidence of modernism is eroded, secular moral values, too, come to be questioned. It is here that the works of Nietzsche come to play a prominent role in the analysis of how such a decline in modern confidence is reflected in later colonial works. Even later works such as Apocalypse Now and Blood Meridian provide a view of the colonial enterprise that is in striking contrast to the optimism of early texts. The chronological progression of texts dealt with here, spanning an era of almost three hundred years prove to be reflective, to a large degree, of the decline of modernity and the effects of this on the colonial enterprise as depicted in the colonial genre.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Murdoch University, 2006. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts. Title from electronic document (viewed 17/4/08). Includes bibliographical references (leaves [137]-146).