Bibliography: pages 67-68. / This dissertation examines how ideology is constituted in texts, and how colonial texts generally support the hegemonic ideology, that is, they offer a point of view which is racialistic and a picture of blacks which is patronizing and denigratory. With regard to the colonial white population, colonial texts generally portray a strongly patriarchal, often authoritarian societal structure. William Plomer writes within the liberal tradition and therefore seeks to undermine the dominant ideology. He shows how contradictory the colonial attitude to the natives is and how the 'civilising' mission often runs counter to the colonial desire for the ease and luxury which require a subject and 'uncivilised' population. The dissertation looks particularly at the portrayal of family life in Plomer's South African short stories and in Turbott Wolfe. It sees that society limits the range of what the author can invent, that the author in many cases 'encounters the solution' (Macherey), and Plomer seems unable to present a work in which a couple of mixed race is able to find a role in society. In the short stories, Plomer portrays families as weak entities, with married people often yearning for partners of a different racial group. Marriage is shown to be undermined by the racialistic and authoritarian strictures placed upon it. In Turbott Wolfe, Plomer portrays several bigoted and vicious white families with the men having secret liaisons with black women and seldom acknowledging their progeny. The only couple of mixed race, seems to operate in a social vacuum and has symbolic value only. Plomer thus presents a society and a familial structure undermined by the very restrictions which are designed to safeguard them.

Critics have long neglected Shakespearean comedy's examination of the household's role in the formulation of community values by reading its references to domestic life allegorically as commentary on the ostensibly more important public realms of marketplace and state. This dissertation argues that representations of the household in the comedies are best understood as theatrical explorations of ethical inquiry as it pertains to everyday lived experience. Using contemporary sermons, political tracts, and conduct books to situate Shakespeare's plays within a larger cultural movement that was coming to understand the household as a foundation of the moral economy of early modern England, this study provides readings of The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest that emphasize each play's investigation of the household as a potential locus of the good life. The characters in these plays develop an awareness of themselves as members of broader communities by negotiating the particular details of household existence---by sharing meals, exchanging gifts, and falling in love. This awareness is in turn presented as a necessary component of personal happiness and a fundamental constituent of a just and merciful state. By developing an account of household life in the plays, this dissertation argues that recognizing the importance of affective domestic relations to constructions of the self as socially embedded moral agent is crucial to understanding the comedies' nuanced analysis of gender, class, and race relations.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

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In my thesis I look at adopted characters in nine nineteenth-century works: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and both Bleak House and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. From these works we see that the figure of the adopted child both destabilizes and expands the Victorian concept of the family, a concept which the literature of the time was often concerned to reinforce. Since adoption implies the injection of a foreign element into the fabric of family life, it serves to underline the fragility of blood-ties. In this sense, the adopted child functions as a figure of subversion and instability within the heart of the family. But because adoption also implies a looser acceptance of what family means, it may serve to expand the definition of kinship. The tension between these two ideas is dealt with in my thesis. No two novels treat adoption in the same way and the possibilities for adoptive relationships are endless, with potential for good and bad relationships, allegory and realism, expansion and deconstruction of the family. / 150 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

The initial part of this M.A. thesis is a fiction describing a travel to Greece; it deals with separation, memories and identity. / The following part is an essay on memories and filiation in Le temps qui m'a manque, by Gabrielle Roy. Four reminiscences will be scrutinized: her mother's house, the satin collar, the medals and the seagulls. The first one is about continuity and identification (the mother's house); the second and the third ones, the satin collar masking the unfinished hem, the medals relating to owing, illustrate a filiation based on want. Lastly, the memory of the seagulls synthesizes the light and the dark sides of the mother-daughter filiation, the daughter leaving her mother (rupture) to fulfill her mother's as well as her own dream of freedom (continuity).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 301-317).

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