Anna-Maria is a cellist at the Ospedale della Pietà, a centuries-old Venetian institution that houses a hospital, a convent, an orphanage, and a music school for girls. As Anna-Maria begins venturing outside the walls of the Pietà, the lives of various characters begin to collide--Anna and her chorus mate Maddalena become entranced with an opera that comes through town, a widowed Fishmonger becomes obsessed with Anna because she reminds him of her dead son, an ailing doge mourns the loss of his city, a strange woman who lives in the sea begins meddling with the lives of those she encounters. The story unfolds in a series of interlocking vignettes, curated by an overarching narrator who has some agency over the characters and which sides of their stories she wants to reveal. The larger narrative structure imitates that of a music score, or a libretto, each vignette carrying a particular thematic sound that functions as a part of the whole. The constraint of the vignette mimics the constraints the narrator has placed on the characters by casting them in their own limiting roles--the young stupid girl, the lusty old maestro, the nun, the widower, the tragic ingénue. As the novel progresses, the characters begin to push against these constraints, and the story begins to slip out from the narrator's grip. All Saints is about performance and expectation, obsession and objectification, empathy and connection, the real and the surreal, and the limitless ways that different lives can come together and unfold.

A collection of short stories.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: leaves 364-377.

L’espace et ses multiples figures occupent une bonne partie des écrits romanesques de Julien Gracq. Cependant la description n’évoque pas un monde réel : elle est une création pure de l’imagination. Les techniques poétiques utilisées concourent à l’invention d’un monde imaginaire, tandis que l’évocation de tout événement réel est supprimée de l’œuvre. Le lecteur est toujours placé devant la même évidence: la narration est exclusivement réservée à la description spatiale. Celle-ci n’est plus qu’un simple « moment douloureux » interrompant l’action ou retardant le fil narratif, mais un moment crucial qui reprend les actes du récit à travers les multiples signes annonciateurs. Elle entre en concurrence avec la narration traditionnelle en devenant un procédé fondamental de la représentation dans la fiction. La création spatiale chez Julien Gracq consiste à créer un lieu imaginaire d’après un autre, c’est-à-dire, à reprendre les éléments essentiels de ce dernier pour les représenter de manière différente. Le château noir, par exemple, est un prototype de la recréation de l’espace. En effet, le romancier s’inspire souvent d’un modèle déjà fait. Par ailleurs, cette écriture gracquienne ne parle pas uniquement de l’espace, mais elle s’accomplit également dans l’étendue blanche que constitue la page. Celle-ci apparaît comme le terrain propice à l’émergence des écrits des autres. Elle est une initiation de voyage dans l’espace de l’autre. C’est pour cela que l’écriture de l’espace de Gracq est dite hétérogène, car elle est faite d’éléments variants entre le littéraire et le non littéraire. Son texte est considéré comme une mosaïque de citations, de transformations et d’absorptions de textes étrangers. / Space and its multiple aspects occupy a big part in Julien Gracq's novels. However the given description does not call to a real world. It is a pure creation of the imagination. The used poetic techniques contribute to the invention of an imaginary world, whereas the evocation of any real event is deleted by the work. The reader is always in front of the same evidence: the major part of narration is the spatial description. This spatial narration is not only a simple useless pause that interrupts the action and delays the narrative thread, but it is a way in itself to tell the acts of story through the significant signs. In other words, these pauses become a technique of story telling, unlike what was known in traditional narrative fiction. The spatial creation is, to the author, a recreation of an imaginary place according to the other one, i.e. in using the essential elements of this last one and to represent them in a different way. The black castle, for example, is a prototype of the re-creation of the space. Indeed, the novelist is often inspired by an already made model. Moreover, the gracquienne writing is not only about space, but uses also the blank area of the pages. This latter turns out to become a place to hold the writings of others. It is an initiation to the journey in the space of the others. That’s why Gracq’s space writing is said to be heterogeneous; it is made by elements that shift between literature and non literature. His text is considered to be as a mosaic of quotation, transformation and absorption of foreign texts.

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No description available.

A collection of reflective essays on the personal relationship with identity, land and travel. All of the essays are united by common themes of liminality, transformation and neutral space, set against the backdrop of Iceland and Hawaii. Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep writes how certain geographical "zones," those that are semi-civilized with less precise boundaries are neutral zones. For example, deserts, marshes and virgin forests equally accessible to everyone because they are places in between. Whoever passes through these sacred spaces finds herself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a length of time—wavering between two worlds. Travel neutralizes the traveler, forces her into a space of imbalance and liminality (i.e. the threshold), where as an outsider she is as equally weak as she is powerful. I am interested in exploring this liminal space as it relates to my own personal relationship with identity and belonging. Throughout my life the topic of symbolic and spatial liminality appears again and again: through my identity as a "third-culture kid" raised in Saudi Arabia; through my own biraciality; through travel in general or even the physical act of the journey. I imagine this self as part of the Earth (a secular relationship represented by Hawaii) and part of the Sky (a metaphysical relationship represented by Iceland).

Esther Cain is living on her own for the first time, trying to make sense of a childhood as a missionary's daughter in Alaska, a past that was defined by prophecy, visions, and the voice of God as interpreted by her father. Alex Fuller is studying medicine and muddling through a relationship with his first boyfriend. But when Alex and Esther are drawn back to the mountains of South Carolina where they briefly knew each other as children, they must each confront questions of faith, sexuality, and the painful ties of family.

<p>In this dissertation, the author examines the historical novel Manly pursuits (1999), by Ann Harries. The novel deals with the late nineteenth century in Oxford, England, and inparticular the year 1899 in Cape Town. The focus of the novel is on Cecil John Rhodes and his entourage, and their obsession with empire, which culminates in the South African war in 1900. Featured characters include Chamberlain, Jameson, Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dodgson, John Ruskin and Olive Schreiner. Harries novel is interpreted as showing resistance to the Victorian society which is the framework which is seen to developed the class and gender-based valued and imperialist thinking of Rhodes and his following. as such the novel is showing resstance to imperialist thinking, the Anglo-Boer war, apartheid and all the resulting legacies for South Africa.</p>