This dissertation is centered around two related questions: How does literature contribute to the creation of identity? How does narrative locate individuals in the world? It studies how both individual and ethnic identity is shaped by the imagined landscapes encountered by the protagonists of the Greek novel over the course of their journeys. In this dissertation, I develop a model for reading the protagonists' travels across the Mediterranean as an integral part of the genre's narrative strategy. I begin by tracing the novels’ conceptual geographies of the Mediterranean world and the relationship between geographical movement and narrative. The core of my project examines three aspects of the imaginary worlds encountered by the novels’ protagonists: exotic animals, the relationship between humans and their natural landscapes, and exotic societies, customs, and religions. My study ends in Meroë, in the tenth and final book of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika. Meroë is a terminus in two senses: located on the edge of the known world, it is the most exotic of any place visited in the extant novels; it also represents the undoing of exoticism. Heliodoros’ novel describes a gradual process in the course of which Meroë becomes a Greek cultural enclave in an alien land, one that is parallel to, and associated with, Delphi, the religious center of the Hellenic world. Using literary and epigraphic sources alongside ancient visual media and archaeological evidence from Greco-Roman and Egyptian contexts throughout this study, I rethink the relationship between identity, narrative, and the exoticism in the novels. I argue that through their descriptions of wide-ranging travel and exotic locales, the novels reflect a multiplicity of individual ways to be Greek and the many models against which an individual’s Hellenic identity can define itself. The ancient novel is therefore an important expression of Greek identity in the Roman Imperial period. / The Classics

Georges Bizet (1838-1875) is best known for his operatic masterpiece, Carmen, but his other works have received much criticism. Much of this criticism stems from the belief that his work was simply derivative of other composers, including the father of French musical exoticism, Felicien David (1810-1876). However, there has never been any formal study comparing the two composers' compositional techniques.The purpose of this study is to compare the approaches that both Bizet and David took to portray the exotic in their operatic works, and to categorize any differences or similarities between the two composers' styles. The operas chosen for this study include Bizet's Les Pecheurs de perles (1863) and Djamileh (1872), as well as David's La Perle du Bresil (1851) and Lalla-Roukh (1862). Detailed historical background and musical analysis will be provided for each opera. / School of Music

This dissertation presents an investigation into the notion of the freak in the guise of exotic characters as these appear in the strange creature-figures in Jane Alexander’s (b. 1959) installation artwork African Adventure (1999-2002). The installation artwork reveals issues pertaining to the way in which the exotic nature of the freak is made manifest in its hybrid spatio-temporal nature, with reference also to the understanding that freaks are often presented as strange yet awesome consumer objects. Alexander’s view of art and her oeuvre are contextualised within the South African milieu which is characterised by change, and laced with utopian as well as dystopian sentiments. The interpretation of African Adventure is theoretically entrenched in certain key concepts: the freak, the exotic, and hybridity, as these are made manifest in the reading of the characters, time and place presented in the installation artwork as allegorical reflection of contemporary South African society. The exploration of the work’s spatio-temporal dimensions are guided by establishing a link between, on the one hand, the desire for experiencing the thrill of the unusual (both in terms of a perspective of a colonial safari as well as the contemporary tourist gaze) and, on the other hand, a number of problematic issues in contemporary South African society. I demonstrate that the South African landscape, people and most likely also history are regarded as exotic – with the freakish associations this implies – also because post-apartheid South Africa has the status of a rarity that can be experienced as an adventure landscape. I further demonstrate how the freak’s exotic figuration ironically reverses the experience of empowered looking, with reference here to the notion of spectacle. In a space where contradiction is exposed for contemplation, this ironic reversal in its hybrid embodiment is understood as a space of reconstitution. In this manner, the presumed notion of a stable South African collective is challenged; South African society comprising of so many hybrid identities is rather understood to be the sum of contestible information where the possibility of fragmented experiences of chaos and reconciliation can coexist. As such, cultural reconstitution and renewal are not based on the exoticism of multiculturalism, but on the articulation of a culture’s hybridity. / MA (History of Art), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

China inspired and fascinated the Western early-20th-century author. Some, like Pearl S. Buck, writing about a China where she grew up and lived for many years, offered careful, portraits of the Chinese people she loved. Others, such as Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer, depicted China as an evil empire and the Chinese as cruel and dangerous criminal masterminds. French author Victor Segalen saw China as the last crumbling frontier of an elusive exotic world that existed in stark contrast to the suffocating modernity and alienation of Europe. This thesis project examines three specific examples of Western literature about China from the early twentieth century: British author Sax Rohmer, whose depictions of exaggeratedly evil Oriental vilains reinforced Western fears of the Chinese Other; French writer Victor Segalen whose mystical portraits of a magnificent Chinese Empire served as the basis for his artistic manifesto on exoticism, and Pearl S. Buck, whose portrayals of sympathetic Chinese peasants helped shift American popular opinion and foreign policy. These three authors, though their styles, approaches and motives varied greatly, all feature the intersecting themes of exoticism, modernity and imperialism. The tensions between these three elements play out in different ways in each chapter of this thesis, and yet all three are examples of exotic writing about China at a time when exoticism was a lost cause, or as Chris Bongie describes it, “an idea with no future” (15). In these examples, imperialism still coloured perceptions of a racially distinct other, and modernity’s inevitability made imagining the exotic a depressing, frightening or naïvely hopeful exercise. In all three examples, this results in an exoticism that seeks to extend the boundaries of what had become a shrinking frontier. Some of the authors succeed in balancing the tensions between exoticism, imperialism and modernity, but in general most do not, and the texts remain deeply conflicted. / Graduate / 0295 / 0332

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1923.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-142).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Trier, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-188).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1923.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1986. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-158).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.