Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 146-149). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Extract of the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Universidad de Zaragoza, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [413]-418).

Thesis (M.A. (English)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

Falling within the ambit of the Department of English Literature but with interdisciplinary scope and method, the research undertaken in this thesis examines Michael Radford’s 2004 film production William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice using the Book History approach to textual study. Previously applied almost exclusively to the study of books, Book History examines the text in terms of both its medium and its content, bringing together bibliographical, literary and historical approaches to the study of books within one theoretical paradigm. My research extends this interdisciplinary approach into the filmic medium by using a modified version of Robert Darnton’s “communication circuit” to examine the process of transmission of this Shakespearean film adaptation from creation to reception. The research is not intended as a complete Book History study and even less as a comprehensive investigation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Rather, it uses a Shakespearean case study to bring together the two previously discrete fields of Book History and filmic investigation. Drawing on film studies, literary concepts, cultural and media studies, modern management theory as well as reception theories and with the use of both quantitative and qualitative data, I show Book History to be an eminently useful and constructive approach to the study of film.

The focus of this thesis is to trace the dialogue between the Greek cinéma d' auteur and Greek literature focusing on film adaptations of Greek literature from 1964 to 2001. It is argued that film adaptations are a sensitive prism through which to examine the auteurs’ cultural politics regarding their work and, through that, understand the economy of the auteurist cultural production itself. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One presents the history of the creation of the Greek cinéma d' auteur and traces its developments in relation to the concepts of national and high art. The principle argument is that Greek literature, endowed with notions of high art and national identity, played a key role in the gradual emergence, formation and consolidation of auteurism as a cinema that enunciates national identity and articulates high art values. The next four chapters examine four film adaptations each made by an acclaimed auteur. The chapters endeavour to investigate the identity politics of each director in relation to the categories of high and national art that defined the Greek cinéma d' auteur. Moreover, the chapters aim to study the politics involved in the validation or renegotiation of auteurism itself. The major contribution of the thesis is the exploration of film adaptations of Greek literature in the Greek cinéma d' auteur which has not been systematically discussed so far. Furthermore, the investigation of the two separate components that make up the subject of the thesis, namely cinema and literature, both from a theoretical perspective and within the framework of film studies, aligns the thesis with recent discussions in Modern Greek Studies and theoretical debates about authorship in films, film adaptations as well as peripheral cinemas.

The purpose of this research was two-fold. First, this thesis sought to uncover the implicit concepts associated with mothers in children's stories. Second, this thesis attempted to chart changes in portrayals of mother when translated from print to a visual medium. This research maintains that the concepts of mother in children's stories contain cultural ideals that are related to society's evolving perceptions of mother. Eighteen mother/surrogate mother portrayals were analyzed in 15 novels and 15 videotapes. Each portrayal was coded according to marital status, range of behaviors, 41 individual behaviors within five categories, and the amount of storytime. The results of this thesis reveal that the two most frequent behaviors associated with the role of mother in both media and print are authority and nurturance. The research also found that mother portrayals, when translated to film and television, displayed less dominant and less supportive behaviors than in print versions. Of the 41 individual behaviors coded in both novels and videotapes mothers in films and television were found to display less ability and more affection than their print versions. In conclusion, this study found that mother portrayals, when translated to film and television, may be altered to increase their mass audience appeal.

1) My Truth: Women Speak Cancer is a creative nonfiction based on three years of interviews with twelve survivors told through the lens of the author's experience as a three-time, sixteen-year survivor of multiple cancers. Each chapter features a different survivor and her story; the cancers discussed include non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Osteosarcoma, Melanoma, as well as brain, ovarian, breast, and thyroid cancers. Current definitions, treatments and statistics are included at the end of each chapter. The book ends with a comprehensive After Words, combining poetry and prose, taking the reader on a further journey of introspection on life, love, friendship, and loss. 2) The Narrative of Pathogynography is a critical exegesis using established theory in the fields of creative writing, sociology, ethnography, literature, and medicine to examine and further define the sub genre of the theoria, poiesis and praxis involved in creating women's illness narrative, or what Housel terms, pathogynography. Housel develops original terminology to define yet undiscovered spaces based on her work in My Truth: Women Speak Cancer.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1984. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-287). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

In offering readings of Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, this thesis explores bodies that are caught between signifiers of absence and presence: the woman’s body that is present with absent body parts; the woman’s body that is spoken about or alluded to when absent from view; the woman’s living body that appears as a corpse; the woman’s body that must be exposed and concealed from sight. These are bodies that appear on the borderline of meaning, that open up a marginal or liminal space of investigation. In concentrating on a state of ‘betweenness’, I am seeking to offer new interpretive possibilities for bodies that have become the site of much critical anxiety, and bodies that, due to their own peculiar liminality, have so far been critically ignored. In reading Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, I am interested specifically in screen representations of Gertrude’s sexualised body that is both absent and present in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Desdemona’s (un)chaste body that is both exposed and concealed in film adaptations of Othello; Juliet’s ‘living corpse’ that represents life and death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the woman’s naked body in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) that is absent from Shakespeare’s play-text; and Lavinia’s violated, dismembered body in Julie Taymor’s (Titus, 1999) and Titus Andronicus, which, in signifying both life and death, wholeness and fragmentation, absence and presence, something and nothing, embodies many of the paradoxes explored within this thesis. Through readings that demonstrate a combined interest in Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare films, and Shakespeare criticism, this thesis brings these liminal bodies into focus, revealing how an understanding of their ‘absent presence’ can affect our responses as spectators of Shakespeare’s tragedies on film.

The thesis focuses on the significance of the cinematic medium for Elizabeth Bowen's novels, from the level of prose and formal representations to broader aspects of narrative and character. The chapters on To the North (1932) and The House in Paris (1935) examine complementary issues of motion and stillness and the consequent impact on subjective experiences of time, space, knowledge, and identity. The final chapter expands the issue of genre revision in The Heat of the Day (1949) to the greater problem of precedent and the reconstruction of identity through storytelling; the novel not only uses formal cinematic techniques by evoking the tone of film noir, but also reconfigures narrative and character tropes of the genre. Thus the advent of cinema not only opened up formal possibilities in the language of fiction but also expanded the types of worlds and effects an author could depict.