Includes bibliographical references. / Kavata knows one thing to be true: when it comes to politics, there is no such thing as holy ground. So when she starts a family of her own, she does everything possible to distance herself from her unscrupulous father, and strives to raise her children as honestly and modestly as she possibly can. When her father, Honorable Muli, retires from government claiming that he would like to spend more time with his grandchildren, Kavata indulges him. She allows him to weasel his way back into her life hopeful that her children might have the relationship with her father that she never had. By the time she realizes what Honorable Muli is really up to, it is too late. He has already persuaded Ngugi, Kavata’s husband, to contest the upcoming election for the same seat that he himself held for sixteen years. It’s election time and for a fleeting moment, Kenyans can once again taste sweet power as they make their choices at the polls. In the days leading to the election, Kavata is forced to make a different, more drastic kind of decision; one with repercussions much greater than she could have imagined. The Havoc of Choice is a story about family, politics and journeying through a fractured country in a delicate time. Based on events around the historical election of 2007, the book follows the lives of Kavata and her family at a time when their country was going through one hundred days of violence, shortly after the poll results were announced.

This thesis sees Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy as a celebration of the nostalgia and romance characteristic of the Western and the attendant mythologies of masculinity that the genre implies. My argument runs counter to readings of McCarthy’s texts that view them as revising or querying the mythologies of American culture, such as the argument laid out by John Cant. The initiation process undertaken by the two protagonists in the trilogy is compared to the story of Iron John by Robert Bly. The narratives of both are seen as reactions against feminism, and as being involved in the process of remythifying a male coming-of-age story. In relation to this I will discuss John Grady Cole’s role as an embodiment of the mythical cowboy hero. My analysis then interrogates the dearth of female characters in the Border Trilogy, and uncovers some problematic roles for the females that do feature in the books. I go on to identify certain films that have resonances with McCarthy’s fiction. These occur both thematically in their approach to the ‘damsel in distress’ motif, as seen in The Searchers and Cities of the Plain, and with the representations of Mexico seen in The Wild Bunch and the Border Trilogy. Although it is tempting to read the Border Trilogy as a mythoclastic work, it relies on certain Western conventions and finally celebrates rather than queries the mythologies of American culture, and specifically the mythologies of masculinity.

Sing, cries Jonah, softly, under his breath, as if the word were his last. To sing would be to release the sum of his afflications to the sky.

Bibliography: leaves 166-180. / The central characters in Doris Lessing's novels are usually women struggling to shape for themselves a new and authentic identity in a changing world. In this study it is argued that this quest involves the Lessing character in a conflict less with any man than with another woman. This woman is the mother. The younger woman's task is to resist the compulsion to become like her mother and so lead a narrow, entirely domesticated life. The theme of the mother-daughter conflict is given its first extensive examination in this study. Three of Lessing's works are analysed in detail, while brief reference is made to nearly all of her novels and some African short stories. The three works selected, The Grass is Singing (1950), "To Room Nineteen" (1963), and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), mark the beginning, an approximate mid-point, and the conclusion of the theme under discussion. They are also works that have not, as yet, enjoyed the exhaustive critical attention given to the Children of Violence series and The Golden Notebook.

Includes bibliography. / In this brief study, I have attempted to re-examine various critical issues raised by Thackeray's style, which seem to me unavoidable and which for convenience I have divided into these subjects: "Authorial Voice", "Satiric Method"'• "Stereotyping", "Time" and "Cynicism and Distance". I hope that the title: "Nostalgic Satirist" will be seen to have some meaning in view of the comments made in these chapters. The first of these concentrates predominantly on Thackeray's habit of commenting in asides, a habit much criticised and which I have attempted to defend in terms of the genre of Thackeray's works, which I take to be closer to the eighteenth century than to the Victorian era. I have attempted to explain his tendency towards towards rhetoric in terms of his self-conscioμs attitude, the special relationship he has with his reader, and in terms of his satiric method which is necessarily often rhetorical.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-100). / J.R.R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories" lays out three essential functions that all good fairy stories should fulfil: recovery, escape, and consolation. To carry out these functions, the fairy story needs to create a believable Secondary World that is separate from the Primary World in which we live. In fact, Tolkien does this on two levels: the Secondary World of Middle-earth, and the inner Secondary World of the Elves.

The 'Bard of Empire' Rudyard Kipling's Boer War (or South African War) writing has largely been dismissed as jingoism. Yet these texts may well have something to contribute both to existing discourses around colonialism, as well as to our understanding of South Africa's deeply intertwined racial and political history. While his Indian writing is also informed by an imperial ideology, Kipling's South African writing is more overtly dogged by imperial contradictions and a lack of thematic and narrative clarity. As such, his Indian writing provides a useful touch-point throughout this thesis. Of particular interest here is the seeming tension between Kipling's representations of the Boers as both 'degenerate' and as 'white'. Broadly, in the course of this thesis this tension is approached in two ways. This first of these considers the motivating forces behind Kipling's racialization of the Boers, specifically in terms of the anxieties provoked by the colonisation of another 'white' race. As such, this anxiety is read as stemming largely from a perceived cultural trangression on the part of the Boers - an inversion of the dynamic that typifies many of Kipling's Indian texts. Following this, some of the rhetorical devices by which Kipling (re)enforces notions of 'white loyalty' and, more broadly, a strict visually marked racial hierarchy, are considered. In so doing, some of Kipling's Boers are read as, somewhat surprisingly, representing a silenced subaltern voice who are made to speak exclusively in support of the empire. Through the commingling of these representations Kipling seems to participate in a discursive conflict over the conception of whiteness both within the empire and South Africa.

Includes bibliographical references. / Set against the political backdrop of the boycotts, arson and funerals of July 1980 in Grahamstown, this novel explores how the discovery of the dead body of a street child under the walls of St Jude’s Chapel sets events in motion that provoke the spiritual crises faced by the two protagonists. Father Philip Riley, the non-stipendiary curate at St Jude’s who had come to South Africa as a missionary inspired by Trevor Huddleston, has over the years lost any sense of his priestly vocation and his own personal beliefs. Lieutenant Daniel Broughton of the Grahamstown CID has to solve the mystery of the boy’s death, but he too has lost his idealism following a career in the South African Police that began at Sharpeville, and now hovers in a dead-end position in Grahamstown. Both these men have to come to terms with what the death of the street child requires of them. Riley has to overcome his reluctance to give the child a proper burial, and Broughton has to dig deeper than he is initially willing to, to determine how the child died. As the story unfolds, details emerge which thwart the opening attempts by both men to deflect any responsibility for the child from themselves. Riley had started life in an orphanage, and had been forced into colluding with the supervisor to cover up the cause of death of one of the orphans. He is challenged by the selfless love shown for the child by Mrs Mabata, a parishioner at St Jude’s who had tried to foster the street child. He realises that his reluctance to engage with the situation has to do with denying his own failures, based on his own life story. Giving in to pressure from a Roman Catholic priest to carry out the funeral, he discovers an inner strength to defy a police order not to conduct the funeral. The funeral goes ahead successfully, and Riley experiences moments of transcendence that allow him to re-discover his vocation. On the other hand, Broughton discovers that the street child’s involvement as an informer for the Security Police had been the cause of his death.

Bibliography: leaves 80-82. / In this dissertation I have sought to examine some contemporary representations of Elizabeth I. Beginning with an outline of how the queen struggled to construct her feminine power within and beyond dominant patriarchal discourse, I go on to explore closely three modern filmic treatments of the queen: The Virgin Queen (1955), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) and Elizabeth (1998). These films are discussed in terms of their engagement with Elizabeth's iconography and mythic biography, and in terms of the anxieties reproduced as a consequence of their grounding in particular historical eras.

This study explores, through detailed analysis, the many and varied depictions of mothering, in a broad sense, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, published between 1868 and 1886, and in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne series, published between 1908 and 1939. Definitions of the role of ‘mother’ and of ‘motherhood’ point to the active choice to mother and the exercise of motherly attributes as the primary requirements for identification as a mother, suggesting that the role is not limited to biological relationship or gender. Many attributes that are still identified, in many circles, even in the twenty-first century as characteristic of the ideal mother are embodied in Little Women’s idealised mother figure, Marmee, who is established as a benchmark of traditional, successful motherhood, born out of Alcott’s progressive dialogue with dominant nineteenth-century sentimentalist discourses. The study shows that there is power in mothering, and the success of a mother can be measured by the harvest reaped through the mother’s exercise of traditional mothering attributes, as seen in the futures of those who are mothered. While Alcott does begin to explore successful alternative mother figures in her Little Women series (such as Beth, Jo and Aunt March), Montgomery focuses almost exclusively in her Anne series (1908-1939) on the orphaned Anne’s bountiful harvest of alternative mother figures, particularly of spinsters such as Anne’s primary mother figure, Marilla. The analysis of the chosen works shows that the shape of motherhood is both simple and complex and that its manifestation in a vast variety of mother figures forms a great sisterhood of mothers in whom the ideals of traditional mothering are preserved for the betterment of society. / Dissertation (MA (English))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / University of Pretoria post-graduate achievement: Master's research bursaries / English / MA (English) / Restricted