Thesis advisor: Robert Lehman / The scholarship surrounding the anglophone Bildungsroman has been to this point largely divided by national and periodized boundaries. This approach to the coming-of-age novel highlights tightly-knit clusters of texts that share geospatial contexts but precludes the possibility that texts from outside these demarcated groupings share essential features that might transcend the borders of nations and literary periods. In the supposed age of literary cosmopolitanism, it is perhaps time for a new approach to the Bildungsroman. I contest that, by approaching various Bildungsromane on the level of their form and structure, new constellations of texts emerge that bring forth new questions and challenges to the conventional narrative of the rise and fall of the Bildungsroman throughout the long history of the novel globally. Each of the texts I discuss fuses a common literary form–the oral tale, the Gothic, literary naturalism, the national allegory–with the coming-of-age novel which inflects and informs its familiar plot, creating cross-cultural and cross-temporal patterns as practitioners of the genre take it up in vastly different circumstances and contexts.  Each manifestation of these hybrid Bildungsromane represents new fields on which the experimental potentialities for individual subjectivity and agency in modernity might ensue, from the early 1840s to the turn of the twenty-first century. In texts which incorporate the chronotope of the oral tale, I argue that authors use the genre to create space for individual agency in a globalizing world. In the inclusion of the Gothic, I suggest, the Bildungsroman resituates the human on the periphery of the text, thrumming with increasingly animate places and things that crowd the individual subject out of her own development. I then question the entropy spirals present in literary naturalism as they temper and trouble the linear development plot, and offer insights into texts that use this fused form to preclude Bildung and texts that use the forces of naturalism to create subterranean structural narratives that reassert its latent potential. I then take the national allegory, a genre with a complex relationship to the Bildungsroman, and argue that the individual subject comes to hold an almost mythic position which comes to be either dissolved or monstrously reasserted in dark reflections of late colonial and postcolonial national imaginations. Finally, I argue that through fantastical realism, a utopian formal play emerges in the narration of the Bildungsroman that creates the narrative space for unique representations of multilayered, open-ended identities at the end of the text. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to address the various configurations of the theatrical tradition of cross-dressing in classical Chinese drama as well as in today's regional operas, placing them in a larger cultural and theoretical context of gender studies. Drawing on cultural theory and viewing the various dramatic and performance texts as signs of historical processes, this study investigates gender construction and gender politics in Chinese theatre in terms of the highly mediated representations of women, gender, eroticism, and cross-dressing presented in a variety of discourses from the Yuan period to the present time. Focusing on cross-dressing as a destabilizing force, it addresses issues of the male/female transvestite theatre and modes of erotic desire, the participation of female players in the cultural (re)production and subversion of gender differences in various historical moments, the figure of the woman warrior and the complexities of gender politics in representing female resistance and containment in relation to the contemporary sociopolitical context, the instability of gender representation in textual and visual media, and the generation of the unsettling notion of gender as performance in traditional Chinese theatrical discourse. The prevalent cross-dressing practice on stage combined with an obsession with "prettiness" and "artistry" in traditional theatre criticism and aesthetics have engendered the subversive feminine, rendering Chinese theatre an unstable site of ideological contestation embodying a simultaneous perpetuation and dismantling of bipolar gender notions and sociopolitical hierarchies. This dissertation also attempts to show that critical reflections on traditional culture can be made to speak to the concerns of today's ideological resistance to political hegemony and cultural dominants, by way of the unveiling of polyvalent meanings of gendering and gendered differences that are constructed, reproduced, dismantled, and contested in that particular site of Chinese culture, i.e., the theatre.

Diss.--Zürich. / Bibliography: p. 113-115.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1930. / On cover: Studies in Celtic and French literature. Vita. Originally designed as an appendix to a study on the "Finn-saga" cf. Pref. Bibliography: p. 283-296.

Diss.--Zürich. / Bibliography: p. 113-115.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1926. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1991. / Vita. Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 277-291).

Inaug.-Diss.--Cologne. / Vita. Bibliography: p. v-xiii.

The author's inaugural dissertation, Munich, 1929. / "Benutzte literatur": p. [9]-10.

<p> During the 18th century, the novel was criticized for a lack of representation of reality and in turn a public distrust of fiction was established. The epistolary form addressed these issues by presenting a narrative that was bound by a real-life structure that allowed for the illusion of reality and authenticity. Today, this distrust of fiction is nonexistent but the epistolary form is still present and a frequently used literary device, providing the real-life structure for an escape from reality. However, while commercial fiction has embraced the form and moved past the historical justification of the epistolary novel, most artists&rsquo; books have not. This paper will prove how the artist book has struggled to move past the historical epistolary form and what lessons it can take from the world of contemporary commercial fiction.</p>