This thesis argues that women writers of the South Asian diaspora are inscribing a literary aesthetic which is recognisably feminist. In recent decades women of the South Asian diaspora have risen to the forefront of the global literary and publishing arena, winning acclaim for their endeavours. The scope of this literature is wide, in terms of themes, styles, genres, and geographic location. Prose works range from grave novelistic explorations of female subjectivity to short story collections intent on capturing historical injustices and the experiences of migration. The thesis demonstrates, through close readings and comparative frameworks, that an overarching pattern of common aesthetic elements is deployed in this literature. This deployment is regarded as a transnational feminist practice.

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Travel writing is by definition an open and hybrid form that encompasses a variety of genres, styles, and modes of presentation. This study focuses on four little-known travel texts about Italy written between 1840 and 1880 by two English and two German women writers and shows how, by exploiting the openness of the form of travel writing, they broadened its scope beyond mere description to provide insight into national ideologies and identities while expanding the boundaries of the female sphere of influence. This study considers the following texts: Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), Adele Schopenhauer’s Florenz: Ein Reiseführer mit Anekdoten und Erzählungen (1847/48) (2007), Frances Power Cobbe’s Italics: Brief Notes on Politics, People, and Places in Italy, in 1864 (1864), and Fanny Lewald’s Reisebriefe aus Deutschland, Italien und Frankreich 1877, 1878 (1880). In the first chapter, the four texts under consideration are presented against the backdrop of nineteenth-century sexual ideology of the ‘separate spheres’ and the conventions of women’s travel writing. A survey of the long tradition of English and German travellers to Italy and their writings is provided to establish the context in which the texts were produced. Also considered is the role they play in the narrative of Italian nation-building. In the second chapter, the discussion of Rambles in Germany and Italy examines how, by presenting herself as a mother and an educator, Shelley foregrounds the pedagogical purpose of the book, which aims at garnering the sympathy of her British audience for the oppressive political situation of the Italian people and their growing nationalism. The third chapter explores Schopenhauer’s attempt in Florenz to create her own gendered version of the guidebook for travellers in the style of Murray and Baedeker and to revive the memory of the democratic institutions of thirteenth-century Florence at a time when Italians were fighting for democratic reforms and independence. The fourth chapter shows how, in Italics, the representation of Italy in the wake of its partial unification in 1861 is closely intertwined with Cobbe’s own thinking on politics, religion, and women’s emancipation. The fifth chapter examines how, in Reisebriefe, the discussion of the social and political changes that had affected both Italy and Germany in the previous forty years allows Lewald to engage in a reflection on her own femininity and on the role of women in the newly formed German nation. Shelley, Schopenhauer, Cobbe and Lewald each used travel writing to explore their own identities as women and as writers. Pushing the form beyond exposition into the realm of social commentary, they used it to shape public opinion and to explore new roles for women in society.

Univ., Diss.--Warwick. / Quellen- und Literaturverz. S. [203] - 222.

The following dissertation examines the philosophy of the animal as it appears in twentieth-century British and American literature. I argue that evolutionary theory, along with the Romantic emphasis on sympathy, creates an historical shift in our perception of humans and nonhumans. Beginning with Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby-Dick, the whale represents what I call a transitional animal figure in that the whale not only shows the traditionally symbolic literary animal but also the beginnings of the twentieth century shift toward the literal animal-as-subject. My proposed comparative analysis consists of a return to classic existential and phenomenological philosophers with animal studies in mind. A handful of critical essays in recent years have conducted just such an analysis. My contribution extends these philosophical endeavors on the animal and applies them to major literary authors who demonstrate a notable interest in the philosophy of animals. The first chapter of the dissertation begins with D.H. Lawrence, whose writings in selected essays, St. Mawr, and "The Fox" continue considerations made by Melville concerning animal being. Because Lawrence often focuses on gender, sexuality, and intuition, I discuss how a Heideggerian reading of animals in Lawrence adds value to interpretations of his fiction which remain unavailable in analyses of human subjects. In Chapter Two, I move on to William Faulkner's classic hunting tale of "The Bear" and other significant animal sightings in his fiction and nonfiction. For Faulkner, the animal subject exists in the author's particular historical climate of American environmentalism, modernism's literary emphasis on visuality, and race theory. / This combination calls for a natural progression from a Heideggerian existential phenomenology: a contemporary Sartrean reading of animal being. Finally, the last chapter examines J.M. Coetzee, an author whose texts show the accumulated existential and phenomenological progression in the philosophy of the animal with a combined interest in current political and social issues surrounding animal life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / by Jamie Johnson. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This study seeks to understand colonial narratives of Zimbabwe 1860-1900 as a locus of transgression and opposition. I investigate the range and complexity of discourses within the imperial project open to both European male and female writers, their shifts over time or within one or more texts. Narratives of the explorer, missionary, hunter and soldier are examined as a literary genre in which attempts were made to re-imagine the Western self through an encounter with Africans. I consider how positions from which the European in the colonies could speak and write were reformulated. This study will employ Foucauldian discourse theory in an analysis of the British 'civilizing mission' in Central Southern Africa. The Introduction examines existing historical and theoretical approaches in this field and argues for a particular use of Foucualt's insights and vocabulary. Chapter One is concerned with the way European explorers constituted notions of 'civilized nations' in Europe and 'primitive tribes' in Africa . I then question how this process of division and exclusion was reinforced by the mythography of an EI Dorado in the African interior. In Chapter Two I consider how Colonial Man was constituted in different ways by Victorian discourses of adventure, travel and conquest. I also attempt to account for the effects that followed the activation, within colonial culture, of structures of exclusion and division based on race or class. Chapter Three focuses on the economic dimension of a dissident LMS missionary and the sustained resistance to Western philanthropy among the Ndebele. I also examine the later Mashonaland mission where the missionary-administrator became instrumental in the division and control of Africans. In the final chapter I consider discursive formations which sought to constrain African resistance during the 1896-7 Chimurenga and the institutionalization of a settler order in the post-Chimurenga era. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1998.

More than any other people, the Bushmen - like the Aborigines on the Australian continent - have epitomized the sub-human other in South African historiography. My primary concern in this study will be to interrogate the representations that gave rise to such entrenched notions of Bushman alterity, and the consequences these have had for Bushman lives. Through an assessment of the writings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travellers, missionaries, settlers, colonial officials and scholars, I shall examine understandings of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’, and the ways in which alterity discourse opened up a space for the ensuing colonial policies of genocide and subjugation against the Bushmen. By allowing the Bushman ‘voices’ to talk back - through an exploration of verbal and visual forms of Bushman creative expression - I hope to present a more balanced sense of Bushman ‘identity’, and expose the fundamental intolerance of difference that lies at the heart of alterity discourse. I shall conclude the thesis with a problematization of contemporary trends of representation, an examination of how these often inadvertently continue the process of othering, and a consideration of their repercussions for present-day Bushman lives. Aside from the obvious relevance of such a study to an understanding of both the destructive events and representations of history, and the current traumatic circumstances of Bushman lives, the questions that this thesis raises can be seen to have more far-reaching implications. In a country such as South Africa, with its long history of segregation and discrimination, issues of otherness and difference take on a particularly compelling resonance. It seems crucial - especially at this point in our national progress - to interrogate our historical attitudes towards otherness, and posit more constructive ways of approaching difference, that allow others their distinct identity, without either demonizing or collapsing such difference; or, to phrase it in Homi Bhabha’s question: “How can the human world live its difference? how [sic] can a human being live Other-wise?” (1994:122). / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1998.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-199). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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[Truncated abstract] In this thesis I examine the poetics of Thomas Traherne’s often over-looked Christology through a reading of The Kingdom of God. This work, probably written in the early 1670s, was not discovered until 1997, and not published until 2005. To date, no extended studies of the work have been published. It is my argument that Traherne develops an expansive and energetic poetic expressive of the theme of the ‘Cosmic Christ’ in which Christ is understood to be the source, the sustaining life, cohesive bond, and redemptive goal, of the universe, and his body to encompass all things. While the term ‘Cosmic Christ’ is largely of 20th century origin, its application to Traherne is defended on the grounds that it describes not so much a modern theology, as an ancient theology rediscovered in the context of an expanding cosmology. Cosmic Christology lies, according to Joseph Sittler,“tightly enfolded in the Church’s innermost heart and memory,” and its unfolding in Traherne’s Kingdom of God is accomplished through the knitting together of an essentially Patristic and Pauline Christology with the discoveries and speculations of seventeenth century science: from the infinity of the universe to the workings of atoms. … The thesis concludes with a distillation of Traherne’s Christic poetic The Word Incarnate. The terms put forward by Cosmic Christology are used to explicate Traherne’s intrepid poetic. In his most remarkable passages, Traherne employs language not only as a rhetorical tool at the service of theological reasoning, but to directly body forth his sense of Christ at the centre of world and self. He promises to “rend the Vail” and to reveal “the secrets of the most holy place.” Scorning more “Timorous Spirits,” he undertakes to communicate and “consider it all.”