Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression. / I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.

This thesis argues that the interface between human and machine has been an important system of metaphors since the beginning of the twentieth century in North American science fiction (SF) and nonfictional writings. In examining these texts, this study intends to discuss positions and responses regarding technological developments and the social and political experiences underlying it In my parallel analyses of fictional (SF) and nonfictional (philosophical, scientific, theoretical) texts. I wish to signal similarities and differences among the two fields. In different ways, the treatments of cyborgs and cyberspace in both nonfiction and SF have addressed, through these metaphors, notions of mass culture, democracy, as well as individual and collective agency and subjectivity. I also argue that these critical strategies are best understood as the strategies of two social groups---one, of them in a dominant position (that of a professional, mainly technocratic class) and one in an ambivalently marginal position (that of the readers of a mass genre such as SF). In nonfictional writings, the strategy is as a rule one of either uncritical embrace of the present state of affairs, or a specular one of utter rejection, with the only exceptions emerging from contemporary feminism. In SF, attitudes of both consensus and problematization emerge. Thus, my study also calls for a qualification of claims about "postmodernity" as the privileged period in which technology acquires center stage. My first two chapters foreground some theoretical concepts and issues related to both the study of mass culture and of the SF genre. The next three chapters focus on specific texts about the instrumental body and of the virtual frontier, and on the critical responses (by women, and by dissenting male figures) to them. The conclusion stresses the notions of democracy allegorically presented in these texts.

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This thesis explores the various manifestations of irony in prose-fiction by women in Quebec from 1960 to 1980. Traditionally used by men, irony is gradually becoming more widespread in women's writing, which in itself is an interesting reversal: more often "objects" of irony, women now reverse the rules of the game and become ironizing "subjects". The first part of the thesis investigates explicit irony; that is, irony which is duly identified and already decoded for the reader; for example, the author might emphasize an ironic fate or destiny for her characters, or might invest a character with an attitude, a smile, or remarks that are ironic. Explicit irony most often appears in works published during the first decade of our corpus; use of this form of irony constitutes a critical initial phase in women's writing because it enabled women authors to learn about the resources of irony and employ them in their work. / Explicit irony, therefore, operates within the text and requires minimal competence in the reader for its decoding; the decoding of the text will play a central role in implicit irony, which will be focus of part two of the thesis. Implicit irony manifests itself in the text in three principal forms: rhetorical, structural, and chromosomic. Rhetorical irony emerges from knowledge of the language and requires the reader to identify occurrences of antiphrases, innuendoes, metaphors, and other types of word-games in the text; structural irony depends upon the inner-workings of the text and demands an aptitude for discerning instances of parody, structural paradox, or intertextuality; that form of irony which we have named chromosomic requires a specific decoding that is effected in function of the author's feminine gender. / Following part two, which highlights the reader's role in the process of interpreting irony, the third and final part reveals the principal targets of irony in these women's writings. This tableau of "victims" completes our study by identifying the types of persons, institutions, or ideas that provoke the criticism of women writers. Such a broad range of types, comprising the clergy, education, the family, and foreigners, among others, tends to point toward a common denominator: Power. The authors scrutinize power relationships in all their forms; inspired by their "collective destiny", that persists, even today, in excluding them from positions of decision-making, women now propose a different vision of the world. Irony in the feminine permits an original reading of their struggle and their demands.

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The study addresses the reasons why Buthelezi is regarded as a post-apartheid writer. Among other reasons that are discussed in this study is that in his novels, he touches on some of the issues that were not dealt with in the apartheid period. It also looks at the didactic elements that are conveyed in Buthelezi's novels as far as the post-apartheid period is concerned. Advantages and disadvantages of the post-apartheid period to South Africans are also examined, one of the very important disadvantages being the loss of the spirit of ubuntu among the African people while they try to move on with times. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

The title of our thesis is The Myth of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and J.M. Coetzee's Foe. We intend to show how Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe story has become a renewed, transformed myth in the fictional works of Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee. In the first chapter, we will analyse the attitude of critics to Daniel Defoe, Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee's works, and we shall review the pertinent aspects of the three novelists' life. In the second chapter, we will define the concept of myth according to the African and European thinkers. We shall also stress the types, functions and myth's expressions in literary work. In the third chapter, we shall analyse and compare the characters of the three novels following the theory of A.J. Greimas which will be enriched by Evgueni Meletinski. We will divide the characters into protagonists, accessories, opponents, neutrals and absents. Analysis and comparison of the fictional characters will identify two major groups: colonizer and colonized. There will also be an examination of the meaning of characters' names used by the three novelists as well as our opinion on the fictional characters of Defoe, Tournier and Coetzee. Analysis of plot structures will show how the three novels are composed according to a cyclical pattern. The fourth chapter will be devoted to a comparative thematic analysis of solitude, sexuality and education. This will reveal the two faces of each theme as well as the hidden philosophy of the three novelists. And the fifth chapter will identify the narrative and stylistic techniques of the novels. It will show the kind of genre used by Defoe, Toumier and Coetzee as well as the letter and journal. It will also show the types of stylistic aspects of the three novels which are present in the novels. We will examine in the sixth chapter the spaces and the time framework of the three novels. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

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The present work attempts to study the modes and instances through which the French Revolution is represented within a corpus of selected novels published between 1789 and 1800 in four national literatures, namely the French, English, American and Italian. By applying a methodology which defines itself as both sociological and narratological, we have sought to reevaluate a period traditionally excluded from literary historiography, by means of a survey and a listing of the novelistic fiction produced in the four fields. We have then inserted our quantitative data which clearly shows the steady growth in the production of novels as well as in the reading public during the 1790's, within the context of pre-revolutionary novelistic discourse from about 1760 onwards. / Our overall aim has then been to set up a general typology of literary narratives produced during the revolutionary period according to the model of circulation and reception of works which tends to establish the problematic implications of each text as well as its degree of conformity to narrative conventions canonized by tradition, so as to point out each instance in which a narrative emergence or displacement of literary themes has given rise to a representation of the French Revolution.