A work dealing with the American Army of Occupation in Korea during the early post-war years, the novel examines the nature of the relationships between the West and the of seeing as their differences occur in two divergent cultures. The aggressive nature of the West's sense of choice-in-action is shown on every hand to be in conflict with the East's sense of being, a sense of passivity which appears to be more closely in touch with the laws of human growth as these laws are operative in the universe. In developing this theme through the conflict between two cultures, two different approaches to the nature of reality itself begin to emerge.

Inaug.-Diss.--München. / Lebenslauf. "Literatureverzeichnis": p. [vi]-x.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Adviser: O.L. Davis, Jr. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

According to Pierre Nora, “[m]emory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition”. Drawing on theories of memory and psychoanalysis, my thesis examines the role of memory as a narrative of the past in late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Scottish literature. I challenge Nora’s supposition that memory and history are fundamentally opposed and I argue that modern Scottish literature uses a variety of forms of memory to interrogate traditional forms of history. In my Introduction, I set the paradigms for my investigation of memory. I examine the perceived paradox in Scottish literature between memory and history as appropriate ways to depict the past. Tracing the origins of this debate to the work of Walter Scott, I argue that he sets the precedent for writers of modernity, where the concerns are amplified in late twentieth and twenty-first century literature and criticism. While literary criticism, such as the work of Cairns Craig and Eleanor Bell, studies the trope of history, Scottish fiction, such as the writing of Alasdair Gray, James Robertson, and John Burnside, asserts the position of memory as a useful way of studying the past. Chapter One examines the transmission of memory. Using George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, I consider the implications of three methods of transferring memory. Mrs McKee’s refusal to disclose her experience indicates a refusal to mourn loss and to transmit memory. Skarf’s revision of historical narratives indicates a desire to share experience. The Mystery of the Ancient Horsemen demonstrates the use of ritual in the preservation and the communication of the past for future generations. Chapter Two studies the Gothic fiction of Emma Tennant and Elspeth Barker. I examine sensory experience as indicative of the interior and non-linear structure of memory. I argue that the refusal to accept personal and familial loss reveals problematic forms of memory. Chapter Three traces unacknowledged memory in Alice Thompson’s Pharos. I use Nicolas Abraham’s theory of the transgenerational phantom to consider the effects of this undisclosed memory. I argue that the past and its deliberate suppression haunt future generations. Chapter Four considers the use of nostalgia as a form of memory. I investigate the perceptions and definitions of nostalgia, particularly its use as a representation of the Scottish national past. Using Neil Gunn’s Highland River, I identify nostalgia’s diverse functions. I examine nostalgia as a way in which, through the Scottish diaspora, memory is transferred and exhibited beyond national boundaries. Chapter Five builds on the previous chapter and extends the analysis of the ways nostalgia functions. I study nostalgia’s manifestations in the diasporic Scottish-Canadian literature of Sara Jeanette Duncan, John Buchan, Eric McCormack, and Alastair MacLeod.

Abstract of Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois, 1924. / Vita.

The history that H. Rider Haggard writes about in his imperial adventure romance fiction is neither collusive nor consensual with the Zulu who are often the focus of his novels. He writes a complex colonial narrative that characterises the Zulu as a proud and mythic, yet ultimately doomed, race. His early twentieth century trilogy, Zikali, is unique in that he uses the three books, Marie, Child of Storm and Finished, to narrate three pivotal events in the nineteenth century history of the Zulu Kingdom. In Zikali, he simultaneously propounds the legitimacy of the colonial endeavour, so effectively that he rewrites history, to ensure the primacy of the Englishman in nineteenth century Southern Africa historiography, whilst aggrandising the Zulu kingdom. This reframing of the colonial narrative—to suit the Western interloper—would be evidence of what is a standard trope within imperial adventure romance fiction, were it not for the fact that Haggard is ambivalent in his imperialism. He is both recorder and creator of imperial history, bewailing the demise of the Zulu Kingdom whilst validating the importance of the role of the colonial white Englishman; he senselessly kills hundreds of natives within his books, yet privileges the Zulu. Referencing one of the primary motivational sources in Haggard's own colonial experience, Theophilus Shepstone, I propose to show Haggard's sublimation of Shepstone's ideas into his own African Arcadian romances, and his creation of a Zulu historiography, which would go on to be lauded by the early South African National Native Congress as being one of the foundations of early twentieth century native socio-political self-fashioning. Haggard's work provides a fragmentary and elusive insight into nineteenth century southern African history and offers an abstruse glimpse into colonial culture rarely found in other imperial adventure romance fiction.

This thesis considers some of the ways in which the sea was written about and written with in English nineteenth-century prose fiction. It has become a commonplace of literary criticism that, in the century preceding modernism, prose fiction about the sea was unthinking and uninteresting: indentured to outworn generic codes, tied to certain clichés of national identity, Empire, or slipshod sublimity, and vaguely evoking some or all of them. This thesis does not attempt a general contradiction of this view. What this thesis does suggest is that Victorian fiction is not always naïve about its subject and, at times, displays an awareness of the generic and stylistic hazards attendant upon writing about the sea. To write about the sea was to risk writing vaguely. However, to Victorian novelists who wished to draw on vagueness, the sea offered a subject and a style that could be put to use. The introduction sets out the terms of my discussion both of vagueness, and of the attitudes of Victorian writers and readers to the sea as a setting and theme for fiction. The terms of philosophical vagueness are compared with the nineteenth century’s most influential aesthetics of obscurity: the sublime. The purchase of these theories is then tested, first in relation to Ruskin’s lifelong interest in representing the sea in painting and prose, and second with reference to novels by George Eliot, Thackeray, and Gaskell. Prior critical approaches are also considered, as is the topic of empire, which I explain is not my primary focus. The body of the thesis is devoted primarily to three author studies: Frederick Marryat, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad. Each author wrote vaguely about the sea, though vagueness is shown to be, in all three cases, a resource that can be drawn upon with degrees of self-consciousness; if, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, vague language was considered appropriate to the sea, the linguistic resources that the sea in turn offered began to seem increasingly applicable to experiences characterised by uncertainty. I suggest that the sea establishes conditions that invite a rereading of the many repetitions in Marryat’s novels. These repetitions can be viewed, I argue, as traces of Marryat’s struggle to find a language appropriate to the ocean. In Dickens’s writing, the sea is often present as a source both of metaphor and of experience. I suggest that the slippery doubleness of the literary sea is a means by which both Dickens’s characters, and the individuals he encounters as a journalist, can be made to coexist with their ideal or literary doubles. In my chapter on Conrad, I argue that the sea forms a crucial element of the kind of literary impressionism Conrad recommends in his preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and elsewhere. Vagueness arises when the border between linguistic concepts becomes blurred. Two short interludes, on the subject of shores and depths respectively, consider such permeable thresholds. These interludes also provide a means of charting changes that occurred across the period, a counterpoint to the more temporally specific focus of the author studies. I conclude with a brief discussion of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Critics have distinguished the high modernist sea from what came before; this coda insists that the sort of vagueness valued by Woolf has an earlier origin.

The other side: collective memory in three novels by Amin Maalouf Collective memory is an expression which is used to describe the way in which societies reflect on their past and ensure their unity in the present. This thesis aims to show how narrative in general, and in particular in the novels of French Lebanese writer, Amin Maalouf, plays a crucial role in the transmission of collective memory. The thesis demonstrates that narrative fulfills this function in three ways. Firstly, narrative gives meaning to past events. Secondly, narrative changes and evolves over time. Lastly, narrative ensures a continual exchange between individual and collective memory. Thus, in its capacity to sustain aspects of individual and collective memory, narrative expresses the values that unite society. Central to our analysis of narrative in the work of Amin Maalouf is the concept of "l'autre côté" or "the other side". This is the expression used by Maalouf when referring to his passion for forgotten or uncomfortable aspects of Western and Arab cultural heritage. By informing the contemporary reader of the shared past, Maalouf strives to build bridges of understanding between the two groups. Maalouf's novels explore themes of origins, of exile and of memory. In the three novels we examine, the narrative is centered on the life of the hero who, endowed with exceptional qualities, is tested by the political and religious challenges of his time. The personal qualities of the hero, revealed in his dealings with the crises which form the particularity of his time, determine the orientation of collective memory. The first novel, Léon l'Africain, published in 1986, is based on the life of Hassan al-Wazzan who lived in Spain, Africa and Rome in the early sixteenth century. Hassan tells the story of his family, and of the political circumstances which led to the expulsion of the Arabs from Spain. The second novel, Les Jardins de lumière, published in 1991, examines the life of the poet, doctor and philosopher named Mani who lived in the third century A.D. In the Epilogue of the novel, the narrator states his intention of challenging the misconceptions and distortions concerning the life of Mani. In the third novel, Le Rocher de Tanios, published in 1993, the narrator sets out to find the truth concerning the events surrounding the birth, life and disappearance of the young man named Tanios, who lived in the narrator's village in Lebanon at the beginning of the nineteenth century. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009

The other side: collective memory in three novels by Amin Maalouf Collective memory is an expression which is used to describe the way in which societies reflect on their past and ensure their unity in the present. This thesis aims to show how narrative in general, and in particular in the novels of French Lebanese writer, Amin Maalouf, plays a crucial role in the transmission of collective memory. The thesis demonstrates that narrative fulfills this function in three ways. Firstly, narrative gives meaning to past events. Secondly, narrative changes and evolves over time. Lastly, narrative ensures a continual exchange between individual and collective memory. Thus, in its capacity to sustain aspects of individual and collective memory, narrative expresses the values that unite society. Central to our analysis of narrative in the work of Amin Maalouf is the concept of "l'autre côté" or "the other side". This is the expression used by Maalouf when referring to his passion for forgotten or uncomfortable aspects of Western and Arab cultural heritage. By informing the contemporary reader of the shared past, Maalouf strives to build bridges of understanding between the two groups. Maalouf's novels explore themes of origins, of exile and of memory. In the three novels we examine, the narrative is centered on the life of the hero who, endowed with exceptional qualities, is tested by the political and religious challenges of his time. The personal qualities of the hero, revealed in his dealings with the crises which form the particularity of his time, determine the orientation of collective memory. The first novel, Léon l'Africain, published in 1986, is based on the life of Hassan al-Wazzan who lived in Spain, Africa and Rome in the early sixteenth century. Hassan tells the story of his family, and of the political circumstances which led to the expulsion of the Arabs from Spain. The second novel, Les Jardins de lumière, published in 1991, examines the life of the poet, doctor and philosopher named Mani who lived in the third century A.D. In the Epilogue of the novel, the narrator states his intention of challenging the misconceptions and distortions concerning the life of Mani. In the third novel, Le Rocher de Tanios, published in 1993, the narrator sets out to find the truth concerning the events surrounding the birth, life and disappearance of the young man named Tanios, who lived in the narrator's village in Lebanon at the beginning of the nineteenth century. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009