This dissertation seeks to explore the perceived intricate relationship that exists between constructed identity, discrimination and violence as portrayed in Bessie Head's trilogy from varying perspectives, including aspects of postcoloniality, materialist feminism and liminality. Starting with a background to some of the origins of racial hybridity in Southern Africa, it looks at how racial identity has subsequently influenced the course of Southern African history and thereafter explores historical and biographical information deemed relevant to an understanding of the dissertation. Critical explorations of each text in the trilogy follow, in which the apparent affinities that exist between identity, discrimination and violence are analysed and displayed. In conclusion the trilogy is discussed from a largely sociological perspective of hope in a utopian society. / English Studies / M.A.(English)

In her novel Arabian Jazz, Diana Abu-Jaber attempts to explore the Arab American identity as something new; as an identity that exists related to, but ultimately separate from, the Arab and American identities from which it was originally created. This thesis discusses the emergence of the depiction of the Arab American female identity in the novel, examining how the characters explore issues of race, class, imperialism, and sex within both the Arab and the American cultures as those issues shape female identity. The thesis also presents a rhetorical analysis of the speeches that allow the characters a voice with respect to how identity is shaped and reshaped throughout the novel.

The purpose of this study was to present an analysis of Naguib Mahfouz’s writings in relationship to modern Islam, changes in Egyptian Islam, the impact of colonialism, and modern Muslim Identity. The divergent effects and results of transformations in Egypt are analyzed through history, literature, and religion using theoretical religious, psychological, historical, and social world views. Selected writings of Naguib Mahfouz are used as the central body of literature. Naguib Mahfouz’s writings provide a plethora of divergent views on Egypt, Islam, and the emerging new Muslim Identity. Mahfouz’s writings centralize the many dilemmas that Muslims face today in light of modernity, western influences, and a transforming Islam. In this study there were some conclusions drawn about modern Islam and literature that discuss modern Islam as reflected in Mahfouz’s literary portrayals of ordinary Muslims living in Cairo and Alexandria oscillating between their native Eastern culture and Western colonial influences, as well as the existential and spiritual questions that accompany change for modern Muslims. / Religious Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (Religious Studies)

Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, ecocriticism and political theory, Active Enchantments explores a strain of thought within American literature that understands life in all of its forms to be generated not by self determined identities, but by interconnectedness and self abandonment. I argue that this interest led American writers across the nineteenth century to develop theories of subjectivity and of politics that not only emphasize the entanglement of the self with its environment, but also view this relationship as structured by self overcoming. Thus, when Emerson calls such interconnectedness "active enchantment," he means to signal life's inherent ability to constantly surpass itself, to never fully be identical with itself. My dissertation brings to the fore the political and ecological stakes of this paradox: if our selves and communities are molded by self abandonment, then the standard scholarly account of how nineteenth century American literature conceptualized politics must be revised. Far from understanding community as an organic production, founded on a teleological and harmonizing principle, the writers I study reconceive it around a sense of a commonality irreducible to fixed identity. The politics emerging out of such redefinition disposes with the primacy of individual or human agency, and becomes ecological in that it renders inoperative the difference between the social and the natural, the human and the non human, ourselves and what comprises us. It is the ecological dimension of what seems like a properly political question that brings together writers as diverse as Emerson and Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Fuller and Henry and William James. I argue, for example, that in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, racial minorities emerge from geological strata as a kind of natural archive that complicates the nation's understanding of its communal origin. When she sets her romances on Native American shell mounds in Maine, or makes the health of a New England community depend on colonial pharmacopoeia and herbalist healing practices of the West Indies, Jewett excavates from history its silent associations and attunes us not only to the violent foundation of every communal identity, but to this identity's entanglement in a number of unacknowledged relations. Her work thus ultimately challenges the procedures of democratic inclusiveness that, however non violent, are nevertheless always organized around a particular notion of identity. The question of the self's constitutive interconnectedness with the world is as central to Margaret Fuller's work. Active Enchantments documents how Fuller's harrowing migraines enabled her to generate a peculiar conception of the "earthly mind," according to which the mind is material and decomposable, rather than spiritual, incorruptible or ideal. This notion eventually led her to devise a theory of the self that absolves persons from self possession and challenges the distinctiveness of personal identity. My concluding chapter argues that Henry James's transnational aesthetics was progressively politicized in the 1880s, and that what scholarship celebrates as the peak of his novelistic method develops, in fact, out of a network of surprising and heretofore unexplored influences, William James's concurrent theories of corporeal emotion, Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism, and Henry James's friendship with Ivan Turgenev, which inflamed James's interest in British politics, the Russo Turkish War, and the Balkan revolutions.

by Katy Wai Kwan Ho. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-153). / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgments --- p.iii / Chapter Chapter One: --- The Chinese Wanderers in the United States --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- Cultural Fragmentation and Psychical Split: The Wanderer in Dis-placement --- p.35 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Chinese (Ethnic)-American (Cultural) Hybridity --- p.75 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- "The ""Unhomed"" and Multiplicities of Identity" --- p.98 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- The Images of Wandering --- p.130 / Bibliography --- p.146

The purpose of this study was to present an analysis of Naguib Mahfouz’s writings in relationship to modern Islam, changes in Egyptian Islam, the impact of colonialism, and modern Muslim Identity. The divergent effects and results of transformations in Egypt are analyzed through history, literature, and religion using theoretical religious, psychological, historical, and social world views. Selected writings of Naguib Mahfouz are used as the central body of literature. Naguib Mahfouz’s writings provide a plethora of divergent views on Egypt, Islam, and the emerging new Muslim Identity. Mahfouz’s writings centralize the many dilemmas that Muslims face today in light of modernity, western influences, and a transforming Islam. In this study there were some conclusions drawn about modern Islam and literature that discuss modern Islam as reflected in Mahfouz’s literary portrayals of ordinary Muslims living in Cairo and Alexandria oscillating between their native Eastern culture and Western colonial influences, as well as the existential and spiritual questions that accompany change for modern Muslims. / Religious Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (Religious Studies)

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), British Modernist writer whose search for authentic selves in the lives of the characters in her short stories, is reflected in her innovative style of writing in which she examines the interior consciousness of their minds. Mansfield questions the inauthentic lives of the characters, revealing that the roles they play are socially imposed forcing them to hide their true selves behind masks. The stories which have been chosen for this study focus on women characters (and men also) who grapple with societal prescriptions for accepted actions, and are rendered mute as a result. The women characters include all age groups and social classes. Some are young and impressionable (The Tiredness of Rosabel, The Little Governess and The Garden Party), others are married and older (Bliss, Prelude and Frau Brechenmacher attends a wedding ), while there are also middle-aged women in Miss Brill and The Life of Ma Parker. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), British Modernist writer whose search for authentic selves in the lives of the characters in her short stories, is reflected in her innovative style of writing in which she examines the interior consciousness of their minds. Mansfield questions the inauthentic lives of the characters, revealing that the roles they play are socially imposed forcing them to hide their true selves behind masks. The stories which have been chosen for this study focus on women characters (and men also) who grapple with societal prescriptions for accepted actions, and are rendered mute as a result. The women characters include all age groups and social classes. Some are young and impressionable (The Tiredness of Rosabel, The Little Governess and The Garden Party), others are married and older (Bliss, Prelude and Frau Brechenmacher attends a wedding ), while there are also middle-aged women in Miss Brill and The Life of Ma Parker. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Equatorial Guinea is the only former Spanish colony in Africa south of the Sahara. Consequently, the Spanish-language literature produced by its authors has been resistant to classification in both the fields of Hispanic and African literary studies. This thesis examines a selection of contemporary narratives written between 1994 and 2007 by the following authors: José Fernando Siale Djangany, Maximiliano Nkogo Esono, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel and Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng. My main objective in this dissertation is to identify, explain and relate the ways in which post-independence authors express identity in their respective texts. In order to accomplish this task, this thesis posits situational interactions as the key sites for identity expression. Developed from the tenets of symbolic interactionism, the syncretic theoretical model of identity views it as telescopic. It is expected that, through the examination of the chosen texts, a contribution can be made to the understanding of the way in which each author expresses identity and can therefore feed into the larger discussion of identity in Equatorial Guinean narrative.

This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.