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Guided by the feminist intention of reasserting the importance of neglected female writers, I have used this work to re-examine the lives and texts of eighteenth-century diarists Hester Thrale-Piozzi and Frances Burney. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology, I draw on both literary and non-literary material to examine the effect of familial and social patriarchy in eighteenth-century England. Using the diaries, journals and letters of Hester and Frances, I ask why female conformity to masculine domination was expected, and how violence was used to extract subserviant behaviour from women. Beginning with gossip, and encompassing social, editorial and physical abuse, I use the medical profession's manipulation of female vulnerability to exemplify the way society legitimates violence to ensure female ductility. Moving beyond this physical aspect, I then examine the psychical, and question the existence of a ‘self’ which is vulnerable to external manipulation. By diverging from the influence of Freudian psychology, and developing a form of Jungian feminism, I propose the existence of an essential female Self which transcends the constraints of societal expectations and physical violence. In this work, both Hester and Frances emerge as physically and psychically strong entities who were forced to adopt socially conformist personae to survive.

This thesis is prompted by a curiosity about the popularity of the image of Peter Pan. Realising that the familiar and ubiquitous image is as much a product of consumer culture as it is the result of multimodal adaptations and reinterpretations of J. M. Barrie?s Peter Pan, this study attempts to shovel aside present-day conceptions of Peter Pan stories, so as to unearth the bedrock, to see Peter Pan as it was when it was new, back in its own time. To do so, this study goes back to the original Peter Pan texts. Picking out elements that signal the presence of certain literary modes, this thesis explores how the Peter Pan narratives engage with these modes, genres and traditions. One of the motives of the thesis is to rescue Peter Pan from ghettoization in the cosy category of “children?s literature”, and through critical attention to take it seriously as an important work in the literature of the early twentieth century. Chapter I situates Peter Pan in the pastoral tradition. Adducing William Empson?s concept of the pastoral as the process of “putting the complex into the simple”, this thesis argues that Peter Pan portrays two competing pastoral spaces and lays claim to the tradition by challenging its parameters of innocence. The chapter also invokes Bakhtin?s idea of carnival, asserting that the Peter Pan texts are “carnivalesque” in both their self-referential play with narrative and generic conventions, and with various more or less satirical and transgressive themes. Chapter II traces elements of Pan myths in the texts, and argues that the texts engage with the late-Victorian and Edwardian interest in myth by re-envisioning an avatar of Pan that would take its place amongst other literary Pans of the era, such as those of E. M. Forster, Kenneth Grahame, Elizabeth Browning, and Arthur Machen. The final chapter sets Peter Pan in the midst of a battle of modes of representation and vision, with R. L. Stevenson championing romance and Henry James politely standing for realism. The chapter argues that while the Peter Pan texts belong more to romance, they play with the boundaries of each by critiquing both modes, all the time showing up and relishing the artificiality of narration. The chapter then picks up on the sense of play, pervading Peter Pan’s engagement with every literary mode that has been discussed, and examines the social meanings and aesthetic instances of play against the backdrop of Edwardian England. Throughout the chapters, by dint of its spirit of play, Peter Pan problematizes the modern family and deconstructs the hierarchy of generations, along with the fundamental anthropological categories of childhood and adulthood, categories which were coming under scrutiny and pressure from the modernizing forces at work at the beginning of the twentieth century. With its sustained exploration of the structure of generations, Peter Pan addresses a problem of modernity in spite of its fantasy setting, and there is a case therefore for considering it under the rubric, elaborated by Nicholas Daly, of “popular modernism”. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

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'"Transcolonial Circuits': Historical Fiction and National Identities in Ireland, Scotland, and Canada" explores the intersections between gender, canon-formation, and literary genre in order to argue that English- and French-Canadian historical fiction was influenced, both in form and content, by the precedent-setting fictions o f Scotland and Ireland in the early nineteenth century. Conceived in the spirit o f Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997), this dissertation extends Trumpener's examination of nineteenth-century British and Canadian romantic fiction by exploring in greater detail the flow of ideas and literary techniques between Ireland, Scotland, and English and French Canada. It does so in order to revise critical understandings of the formal and thematic origins and development of Canadian historical fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter One functions as a series of literary snapshots that examine historically the critical and popular reception of novels by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson in Ireland, Sir Walter Scott in Scotland, John Richardson, William Kirby, and Jean Mcllwraith in English Canada, and Philippe Aubert de Gaspe and Napoleon Bourassa in French Canada. I pay particular attention to the issues o f gender and political ideology as inseparable from the history of the novel itself. In Chapter Two, by focussing on the travel trope, I examine in detail how Irish, Scottish, and Canadian writers transformed the investigative journeys of Samuel Johnson and Arthur Young into journeys of resistance to the dictates of the metropolis. Chapter Three focuses on the complications of marriage as a metaphor o f intercultural union. It pays particular attention to the intersections between gender, sexuality, and colonial identity. The Conclusion extends the concerns raised in the thesis about the relationship between historical writing and national identity to the late-twentieth-century Canadian context, by examining the adaptation of literary and historiographical conventions to the medium of television in the CBC/SRC television series Canada: A People's History, which aired in 2001-02.

“Shakespeare and the Drama of Politic Stratagems” focuses on how Shakespeare dramatically explores strategic issues similar to those discussed by Machiavelli and other early modern politic authors. The thesis is structured in order to tackle the diverse nature of strategy while developing and expanding on its most essential issues. The first chapter deals with the amoral and dangerous political world of the first tetralogy, a world in which one must be strategic in order to survive. Since not every strategist engages in the same kind of strategy or even agrees about what the best strategy might be, the second chapter outlines the different characteristics of Shakespeare’s strategists. These strategists can sometimes achieve success on their own, but no one can survive alone indefinitely, and the third chapter thus outlines the importance of strategic alliances and the dangers of making the wrong alliance. The fourth chapter deals with the numerous kinds of enemies that a strategist must contend with. Not all enemies fight in the same way, so a strategist must be on guard against an enemy’s deceptions, the focus of the fifth chapter. Even if these obstacles are overcome, even the most successful strategists will almost inevitably fail at some point or another. That failure may be due to some flaw in their schemes, or it may be due to the extreme difficulty of achieving success indefinitely. The final chapter deals with the perennial conflict between virtù and fortuna and thus the limits of politic stratagems. Machiavelli’s works can be seen as an epicenter of strategic thinking in the early modern period, and so they act as a guide through complex, contradictory, but ultimately rewarding issues of strategy and their consequences. Machiavelli serves as both analogue and foil, for while Shakespeare dramatizes similar strategic ideas, his dramatizations reveal greater truths about what is at stake when one explores the nature and consequences of politic stratagems. This thesis demonstrates the multiple factors that make strategy so dynamic and useful to a young dramatist in the process of discovering his own interests in the art of politics and the art of drama.

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This work challenges common arguments as to the division of the political from other fictional genres and, in treatments of nineteenth-century fiction and culture, the private from the public sphere. Through an examination of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Gaskell, I uncover a common concern with the preconditions of liberal selfhood which posits the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer, defined by interiority and mental qualities, comes to be. This rights-bearer is not, as has been argued, defined by purely formal and abstract procedural reason, but in terms of a capacity for reason which includes the capacity for emotion. This work therefore shows domestic space to be the foundation of, rather than the occluded counterpart to, the liberal polity, and argues that an account of the household, in which the liberal self is disclosed, is likewise at the centre of Victorian political fiction.

Space can be read through text. Space is also constructed through text. Literary and critical theory has, however, emphasised time over space. However, space, place and location are crucial determining factors in any literary study. Through reference to theories of construction of place as well as writings on spatial history and the city I will discuss how place is created through text and how the urban environment affects literary production. Using the work of Michel Foucault (1986, 2002) on space and power, Michel de Certeau's approach to cities (2002) and WaIter Benjamin's (2002) theories on space, time and the city, as well as South African theoretical approaches to space and the city, I will attempt an analysis of place in chosen pieces of literature set in the postapartheid city by selected writers. I have chosen to focus on the cities of Durban and Johannesburg, and in particular the innercities, because it is here that major transformation in the use and representation of space has occurred. By looking at selected apartheid and postapartheid texts I will be able to analyse how the representation of literary space has altered with political and socio-economic changes. The time period I will look at primarily will be the postapartheid period. The interdisciplinary nature of this project means I will draw from literary criticism, critical theory, geography, sociology and economic history as well as elements of postcolonial and postmodem theory. The South African city today is a post-city; postcolonial and postapartheid. So too, the texts I have selected are post-texts, postmodem and post-struggle and I will conduct my analysis with this in mind. The concept of 'city' in literature is much more than just buildings and streets. It exists also in social relationships and links between people, both in the city and places outside of the city. The city is a set of social, political and cultural conditions that manifests itself in space and it is this aspect of 'city' which is represented in these texts that I will investigate. Through focusing on the autobiography Man Bitch (2001) by Johan van Wyk together with Never Been At Home (2001) by Zazah P. Khuzwayo and No Way Out (2001) by Zinhle Carol Mdakane all set in Durban, and Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) by Phaswane Mpe and the short story "Autopsy" (1996) by Ivan Vladislavic set in Johannesburg, I will investigate the representation of urban space in these texts of postapartheid literature. By way of introduction, I will examine relevant selected apartheid texts that deal with the cities of Durban (Lewis Nkosi's novel Mating Birds (1987)) and Johannesburg (selected poems of Mongane Wally Serote) and I will attempt to construct a literary image of the space of these cities under apartheid. A close reading of the texts selected will construct a clear picture of the current (and past) urban space through the medium of literature. It will be seen that major issues affecting South Africa's city inhabitants emerge as themes: AIDS, crime, migration and architectural degradation drive these narratives as does access to once restricted space. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

This dissertation–half of the MA in English Studies by coursework and dissertation–examines selected works of the playwright, poet and novelist, Kendrew Lascelles, who spent his youth and young adulthood in South Africa, and who since the mid-1960s has resided in the United States. The study – the first extended evaluation of Lascelles's work – focuses on those of his plays that feature an African dimension and on his 'post apocalyptic' novel, Tamara Hunney. The argument is that Africa, as a real and symbolic location, persists alongside the US influence in Lascelles's work, whether explicitly, as in his play about living in apartheid South Africa, or by suggestive parallel in his recognition of intercultural potential: for example, his contrast in Tamara Hunney of Los Angeles urban realism and native American ('Red Indian') spiritual redemption; that masculinist worlds (e.g. colonial or apartheid Africa; the US 'wild west', whether past or present) are tempered (educated) through gender sensitivity, or a feminine principle; and that an apparent paradox might but be a paradox in a writer who subscribes to foundational (romantic-conservative) values rather than to the trendy-liberal expositions of a media-saturated American society. The moral vision is captured not only thematically, but is embodied in 'form' as meaning: in surprising shifts of generic convention and style. The study suggests that Kendrew Lascelles's literary work is deserving of serious consideration. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.