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New, old novels, contemporary fictions that parody the forms, conventions, and devices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, form a significant and increasingly popular subclass of postmodernist fiction. Paradoxically combining realistic and metafictional conventions, these works establish an ironic dialogue with the past, employing yet simultaneously subverting traditional fictional techniques. / In this dissertation, I subject five new, old novels--John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor and LETTERS, Erica Jong's Fanny, T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman--to a detailed analysis, which compares the parodic role of archaic devices in each contemporary novel to the serious use made of such devices in the past. I argue that new, old novels, by juxtaposing old and new world views, foreground the ontological concerns of fiction and suggest that literary representation is constitutive rather than imitative of reality. Their examination of the relationship between fiction and reality places them at the centre of contemporary concern.

MA (English) / Department of English / In this study, I explore the depiction of homelessness in K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents (2000) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001). Against the background of post-colonial and transcultural theories, I explore the effects of homelessness on select characters depicted in the two novels, particularly how homelessness and its effects impact on the characters’ identity and human dignity, as some of the themes which the two authors deal with. I achieve this through a close analysis of themes, characterisation and style as well as a demonstration of how the metaphor of the plight of the homeless is drawn from the experiences of the homeless characters portrayed in the novels. I establish, through this study, that the two novels depict characters on whose identity and human dignity, colonialism had an adverse impact. I argue that the corroded dignity and identity of the select homeless characters can be restored through the application of the tenets of transcultural theory. I consistently identify the central morals of the two novels under study as highlighting the need for society to address the plight central to the two novels’ major themes of homelessness, poverty, identity and human dignity against the backdrop of postcoloniality and transculturalism.

With its focus on the relationship between dreamscape and death, this study examines the possibility of indirectly experiencing – through writing and dreaming – that which cannot be directly experienced, namely death. In considering this possibility, the thesis engages at length with Maurice Blanchot's argument that death, being irrevocably absent and therefore unknowable, is not open to presentation or representation. After explicating certain of this thinker's theories on the ambiguous nature of literary and oneiric representation, and on the forfeiture of subjective agency that occurs in the moments of writing and dreaming, the study turns to an examination of the manner in which such issues are dealt with in selected dreamscapes. With reference to David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, Alan Warner's These Demented Lands, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life, the thesis explores the literary and cinematic representation of human attempts to define, resist, or control death through dreaming and writing about it. Ultimately, the study concludes that such attempts are necessarily inconclusive, and that it is only ever possible to represent death as a (mis)representation.

In the reading of the servants in examples from the period 1920-1950, the servant question is invoked to expose the workings of class. The servants in these narratives of Bowen, Green, Taylor, Waugh, Mansfield and Panter-Downes, lady’s maids, housekeepers, nannies, a butler and a chauffeur, are in thrall to the collective structures of societal ordering, and reluctant with respect to social mobility. Class was not fully being negotiated in this period, in fact little change was visible. Fer example intimacy, such as that between the lady’s maid and her mistress, meant that class confrontation was unlikely. The nanny showed that culturally constructed mechanisms such as nostalgia could be employed to discourage the desire for change. In terms of the socio-historical context any transformation in the make-up of domestic life – that is, the move towards homes without servants - was a fairly gradual business. But, there was a widespread belief in a change that had not really taken place – and that certainly had not taken place within domestic service. Any transformation of society was superficial; the governing ranks would not permit their disempowerment through genuine class change. I contend that the literature supports this perspective. Servants desire subservience; they find comfort in the familiarity of the system of household ranking-by-status. In the process, authority itself is portrayed as being less immutable, more malleable and thereby equipped for the future. In this sense the narratives read in this thesis go to make up a literature of resistance, in refutation of the overwhelming narrative of the time, progressing instead the notion that class must persist with its boundaries intact, as its hegemony is desirable and necessary for the smooth, successful operation of society.