Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-332).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1963. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-314).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisors: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford and Warwick Wadlington. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1997. / Title from title page screen, viewed June 5, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ronald Fortune (chair), Rodger Tarr, Ray Lewis White, Douglas Hesse. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-199) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2004. / Advisor: Joseph Adamson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-225). Also available via World Wide Web.

This thesis examines the relationship between the discourses of law, aesthetics and sensibility during the eighteenth century and argues in favour of a strong conceptual link between them. This nexus will be shown to be central to an understanding of constructions of femininity in eighteenth-century English fiction and within the wider social and cultural domain. Central to the work theoretically is a theory of the sublime which draws upon Lyotard's 'The Sublime and the Avant-Garde', but which reworks its insights in the light of Luce Irigaray's analysis of the role of the feminine within Western culture. From this will emerge the central theoretical tenet of this work: that within Western culture woman is an object of dread, or a 'sublime object'. From this theoretical perspective, the historical situation of the eighteenth-century woman and her representation in fiction will be considered. It will be argued that a certain form of 'improper' feminine subjectivity developed during this period due in no small measure to the operation of aspects of English law and the discourse of sensibility. The term 'improper' as it is meant to be understood in this work will be rigorously defined in the early chapters and the position of woman as an improper subject, it will be shown, is never far removed from her status as sublime object.

Olive Schreiner, writing in the tradition of George Eliot and the Brontës, was an isolated yet original figure who opened up new directions in women's fiction. In her novels, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) she developed a feminist critique of colonialism that was based on her own coming-of-age as a writer in South Africa. Schreiner's work inspired and influenced Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, who have pursued their visions of the colonial African heroine in changing forms which nevertheless consciously hark back to the "mother novel." Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937), Lessing's Martha Quest (1952) and Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953) are in a sense revisions of Schreiner's Story of an African Farm. These texts, together with later novels by Lessing and Gordimer (such as Shikasta and Burger's Daughter, 1979) and key short stories by the four writers, form a body of writing I call the "African Farm" texts. Written in different colonial countries—South Africa, Kenya and Rhodesia—in response to different historical circumstances, from different ideological and aesthetic stances, the "African Farm" fictions depict the problematic situation of the white African heroine who is alienated both from white colonial society and from black Africa. Through her own rebellion against patriarchal mores as she struggles to define herself as an artistic, intellectual woman in a hostile environment, she uncovers the connections between patriarchy and racism under colonialism. She begins to identify with the black Africans in their oppression and their incipient struggle for independence; however she cannot shed her white inheritance of privilege and guilt. Just as colonial society (the white "African Farm") becomes for her a desert, a cemetery, a false, barren, "petrified garden," so black Africa becomes its idealized counterpart: a fertile realm of harmony and possibility, the true Garden of Eden from which she, as White Eve, is exiled. I trace the "African Farm" theme and imagery through the work of other white Southern African writers, such as J.M. Coetzee, whose stark, poetic, postmodernist novels can be read as a coda to the realistic fiction of the four women writers. Finally, I look at the post-"African Farm" texts of such transitional writers as Bessie Head, whose novels of black Africa preserve a suggestive link with Schreiner. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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