<p>This thesis examines a selection of Anglo-Saxon texts featuring food, medicine and magic circa 975-1100 C.E and explores the ways in which food preparation, spiritual practices and magic were related to eating, spiritual and bodily health. I argue that during this period a context-specific attitude of continuity between magic and prayer, food and medicine was present. The supernatural was not differentiated from, but bound up with speech, the body and eating. A study of these texts grants us access to Anglo-Saxon perceptions ofhealth, spirituality, human relationships and death. In order to discuss this special literary space in history we need to develop a critical language that can convey the spiritual force ofwords without putting them into binary categories of "Christian" or "Pagan." Medieval texts resist modem and postmodern literary and historical categorization, making it more important to analyze the significance of overlap than to study the history of these works in isolated disciplines.<br />This project consists offour sections, each a different framework with which to approach and analyze these texts. These sections are as follows: Part 1) Food and Consumption, Part 2) Magic and Prayer, Part 3) Medicine and Death. A single Anglo-Saxon charm, for example, will receive three separate treatments and analyses. The categories that I have set up will thus work to demonstrate their very non-existence; the same passages can be studied three different ways and simultaneously have three different usages and meanings. My fmal conclusion functions as a connecting space where I will explain the ways in which this thesis both demonstrates and participates in the fluidity and permeability ofthese texts. As the separate discourses offood, magic and medicine synthesize in the conclusion, so too will the reader's categorical understanding of the Anglo-Saxon world.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>Historically, the Gothic, both in its plastic and literary manifestations, may be broadly defined as a reactive aesthetic movement--reactive against classicism, Reason and, most importantly, social convention. Typically, the Gothic imagination, as exhibited in eighteenth-century Romantic fiction, seeks out sensations which are morally and psychologically aberrant, and experiences which are sometimes flagrantly anti-social, these predilections expressing a grave mistrust of the status quo and, at the same time, an angst at having lost a coherent ethical framework. This thesis attempts to gauge the artistic, intellectual and emotional impact of the Gothic tradition on Dickens the social critic. My intent essentially is to set Dickens within the general context of dark Romanticism, to demonstrate how he exploits the "horrid" imagery (ghosts, corpses, corruption) and melodramatic narrative technique of Gothic romance quite as competently as any sensation novelist, yet turns them to the account of a dedicated<br />Victorian social conscience. I focus primarily on Bleak House, probably Dickens's most emphatically "Romantic" novel, but also take some note of his earlier and later career.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>In Darkness at Noon the third person narrative and the structure of the story itself are dictated solely by the polemical intent. Koestler wants to force the reader to relive Rubashov's struggle to maintain his individual identity despite overwhelming pressure to adopt that of the Communist Party. His intellect is already so molded to this group that only in his emotions, most of which he has repressed, can he find the seeds of his authentic self. The narrative technique encourages the reader to view the story through the aperture of this inner self but when Rubashov shifts his centre of consciousness to his reasoning persona the reader's perspective is destroyed, along with much of the moral and aesthetic force of the novel.</p> <p>The unconscious as a subject invites the use of symbols. Those of Koestler grow naturally out of, the facts of his story; they even reinforce one another, and spawn related images until some passages approach allegory. They are also useful litmus papers for detecting the emotional attachment to Marxist ideology Koestler retains.</p> <p>In this novel Koestler dramatizes his arguments by embodying all those he wants us to approve in Rubashov and all those he wants us to doubt in the Party; thus he controls our responses very precisely. But the split in Rubashov designed to clarify Koestler's ideas also destroys his human quality and so undermines the tragedy of Darkness<br />at Noon.</p> <p>It is not the didacticism but the subject matter of this novel that undercuts its aesthetic quality. The narrative technique pulls the reader inside Rubashov's emotions but when Rubashov loses contact with this self, the reader loses his window on events and his<br />concern about them. And, in a novel about individual freedom, the process of making explicit the normally implicit motives of an individual celebrates the philosophy of determinism rather than freedom. However, the loss of the reader's connection with the centre of consciousness and the difficulty of communicating the nature of freedom are overcome by the fascination of the contradictory emotions aroused by the ideas in Darkness at Noon.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This study considers how South Asian North American female writers aliiculate identity formation. While subjectivity has been a discursively explosive topic in postcolonial alld feminist studies, the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality as it relates to South Asian women of the North American diaspora remains overlooked as a subject of sustained query. Addressing the ways in which European colonialism enforced the construction of a European 'Self and a non-white 'Other,' my study explores how South Asian North American women negotiate issues of racial privilege and oppression within their interracial relationships, and considers how these relationships inform their identities. Chapter 1 ("Normalcy, Desire, and Orientalism in Heteronormative Interracial Relationships") investigates how racism and colonialism affect the politics of desire and identification in the heteronormative relationships depicted by Sharmeen Khan alld Tanuja Desai Hidier. Chapter 2 ("Normalcy, Desire, and Orientalism in Same-Sex Interracial Relationships") explores how Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, Almie Dijkstra's "Colombo to Haputale," and Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscombe's Flesh and Paper articulate desire and subjectivity in same-sex interracial relationships. Concerned with issues of the body, subjectivity, and space, Chapter 3 ("The Simultaneity of Geography, The Confines of the Body, and Forging a Space of Possibility") considers how the aforementioned writers attempt to create alternative subjectivities and spaces that oppose Orientalism.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis examines the ways in which the bodies of British captives among Native North American peoples in the mid- to late eighteenth century become sites of violence that implicate British colonial practices and policy, as well as domestic systems of discipline and justice. The captivity narratives which inform this work are from the period beginning in the mid-1750s and ending shortly before the American Revolution; these years witnessed arguably the most intense and widespread conflicts between First Nations and European powers than at any other time in the century. The narratives produced during this time reflect this heightened violence, and as such have long been dismissed as anti-Aboriginal propaganda or hyperbolic spectacles of violence meant to excite or elicit sympathy from the reading public. When considered in their colonial context, however, they become much more ambivalent documents.</p> <p>The first chapter traces the moments of capture, or "forced contact," throughout several narratives in an attempt to establish the economies of exchange and violence that circulate captive bodies even before they are taken into "Indian" hands. Chapter two examines the strategies of representation employed by the captives, including stereotypes and scenes of torture, and suggests that these methods implicate the British themselves in Indian savagery. Finally, the last chapter looks at the ways in which captives "go native," despite the seeming lack of (willing) transculturation in the narratives as a whole.</p> <p>The captivity narrative is frequently considered to be a uniquely North American form of writing that announced the emergence of American writing and subjectivity. This thesis argues instead that they must be considered within the context of British colonialism, and to a certain degree within the broader, global captivity geme. Only then can their role as conflicted accounts of aggressive European expansion be fully assessed.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>For Samuel Richardson, language is the means by which he tells the story of Clarissa but, more importantly, it is his symbol within the novel of the deceptions of the world. It is language that leads the heroine away from herself and from everything that she holds dear; it is language that frustrates her and Lovelace's attempts to reach an understanding; and it is language, finally, that must be abandoned by Clarissa as she<br />prepares herself for death. Through a close study of the language of Clarissa, this paper attempts to define the heroine's relationship to the words she and the other characters use and to trace Richardsen's involvement with this theme. It is argued that Richardson emphasizes Clarissa's attitude towards language through the use of imagery, lmagery which is especially noticeable and important towards the end of the novel when the heroine rejects ordinary words in favour of sacred language.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis studies the attempts made in the Noah plays of the medieval mystery cycles to adapt the basic details of the Great Flood to a much broader contemporary Christian context. Although the biblical source provides little detail, the playwrights consistently portray a Noah who, because of his obedience and meekness, qualifies to be saved from the terrible destruction. Before and after the flood, however, the nature of fallen man and the active interference of Satan continue to threaten what should be a harmonious relationship between man and God. In varying ways all of the Noah plays, including the Newcastle fragment, show that a struggle to earn God's grace must be made against the forces of disorder which occur in contemporary forms. Dramatic improvisations show parallels between Noah's wife and Eve whose complicity with Satan led to the original expulsion from Eden, or indicate the kinds of conditions under which grace may be received.</p> <p>In addition, the Noah plays reveal that the events of the flood were seen as evidence of the extension of God's grace to man throughout biblical history. The escape from death which Noah and his family experience is a figure of the spiritual salvation made available through the sacrifice of Christ. The various playwrights reveal the connection between flood and crucifixion through the use of conventions such as typology, ironic juxtapositions and scenic counterparts. As Noah may be seen as a type of Christ, those agents who initiated disorder in Eden and in the Noah plays recur in later plays as characters who reject the message of Christ and the opportunity for grace provided by His sacrifice. As a group, therefore, the Noah plays reveal the significance of the role which medieval playwrights gave to divine grace and its potential for the salvation of man.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis examines recently published Asian American comics and argues that their engagement with both Asian and American popular culture is a new form of "claiming America." Popular culture is an arena integral to the American national imagination, and hence these comics assert that Asian Americans are consumers of and participants in American popular media, offer criticisms of stereotypes against Asian Americans and suggest alternative representations and representative practices. I argue that "claiming America" must also be inflected globally due to the emphasis on transnationalism in Asian American cultural production, and Asian American comics actively drawing upon Asian popular culture influences and show that Asian popular culture is increasingly circulated in America. Comics are a unique medium with which to claim a space in American popular culture, as Asian American comics creators creatively employ visualization strategies related to race, and take advantage of the hybridity of word and image comics medium to explore Asian American concerns with hybridity. In this process, Asian American comics also engage with the comic as a popular medium and rework conventions particular to American comics to address Asian American concerns. Ethnicity and popular culture has been a relatively neglected field, and I will argue that ethnic communities can be seen as subcultures in the US, whose relationship to the mainstream involve processes such as cycles of incorporation and reinvention. In addition, comics studies is an emerging academic field, and will benefit from contributions from ethnic minority literary perspectives.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis takes as its subject the uncanny intersection of the history of Japanese Canadian intemment and Canadian multiculturalism in Joy Kogawa's <em>Obasan</em> (1981) and Kerri Sakamoto's <em>The Electrical Field</em> (1998). Drawing on Benedict Anderson's analysis of the birth of nationalism (2006), and Michel de Certeau's analysis of the temporal structures that order national historiography (1988), this project examines the process by which the imagined multicultural community of the Canadian nation writes itself through a genealogical historiography-hrough a retrospective mapping of the antecedent origins of multiculturalism. The result of this historiographical process is the construction of a teleological history; consequently, the subversive treatments of race, racialization and systemic, state-sponsored discrimination of both Kogawa's and Sakamoto's historical fictions face repression and containment within the logic of multicultural progress. This thesis examines, then, the tendency within the current multicultural climate to write the history of intemment as a regrettable yet past moment in the progress of the nation, and tums to the novels of Kogawa and Sakamoto to investigate the uncannily disruptive and potentially productive method of resistance that their a-linear, synchronic narratives offer in response to the homely narration of the nation.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)