In this study, I challenge previous assumptions on Thucydides’ silence on gender in the History in order to understand this erasure as a central component of the historian’s attempt at asserting authorial control over a narrative of crisis. My project investigates the gendered strategies employed by Attic tragedy and historiography to represent defiant speakers – characters who challenge traditional speech, like Antigone or the Corcyreans, or those who speak ambiguously, like Cassandra and Alcibiades – in the context of 5th century Athens. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction of the relationship between Thucydidean historiography and drama, my project presents a theoretical reorientation of how the two genres can and should be read in parallel. Methodologically, I integrate close readings with the insights afforded by Anne Carson’s creative engagements with antiquity in order to analyze how gender structures the meaning-making systems in these narratives. Following a chronotropic trajectory, this dissertation investigates how gender refracts through the ways in which the tragedians and Thucydides represent issues of time, space and place, and perception; it then ends by returning to time to offer a critical re-evaluation of the receptions and afterlives of Greek tragedy and history. Ultimately, this study offers a methodology that helps us model a parallel reading of Attic tragedy and Thucydidean historiography; not in order to “test out” the historicity of tragedy against Thucydides’ account, but rather to use tragedy to fill the gap of gender in the History. Probing this dialogue – a dialogue informed as much by silence and omission as by contact and shared vocabulary – among ancient and modern, tragic and historiographic, originary and receptive models of literary entanglement challenges us to rethink the political potential of transgressive speakers within canonical narratives, and to reflect on the role that gender has in shaping these discursive tensions.

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by Lui Sha-Lee. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-149). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Acknowledgements --- p.vi / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Ideological Implications of “Madness´ح in Western and Chinese Culture --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Madwoman as the Murderous Daughter: Kitty Fitzgerald's Marge and Tie Ning's The Cliff in the Afternoon --- p.36 / Chapter Chapter Four --- "Madwoman as the Murderous Wife: Elsa Lewin's I, Anna and Li Ang's The Butcher ´ةs Wife" --- p.83 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Conclusion --- p.121 / Notes --- p.134 / Works Cited --- p.143

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.

Aspects of memory and identity with reference to the prose of Dana Snyman will be reflected in this research report. Concepts from memory studies, such as cultural and collective memory, collective identity as well as nostalgia and loss will serve as the matrix for a reading of his narratives. The reception of Weg, an Afrikaans outdoor magazine (and specifically the contri- butions by Snyman) amongst readers typified as the Weg-generation will be studied. Since the political transformation of 1994, there has been a renewed attempt by Afri- kaners to explore their identity and status in the new dispensation. Snyman’s nostalgic representation of this process can be linked to a current trend in Afrikaans literature where identity and roots are explored in order to redefine Self and Other. His stories document the Afrikaner culture of a bygone era with a view of coming to terms with that past. / Afrikaans / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans))

In this study I apply social constructionism as propounded by Vivian Burr (1998) to show that although J. K. Rowling uses stereotypes in the Harry Potter series as a reflection of how gender is constructed across a wide range of societal institutions in contemporary Britain, she created complex characters who on an individual level subvert social constructs and thereby offers her readers alternatives to culturally defined concepts of gender. I explore the all-pervasive social phenomenon of gender and examine how it is constructed in present-day Britain and reflected in the series (bearing in mind that the first book was published in 1997 and the last one in 2007). My analysis of female and male characters in the books, and their interpersonal relationships, shows that Rowling's often tricky portrayal of femininities and masculinities gives us an honest view of teenagers’ lives and contemporary gender relations in an ever-changing, complex world. / English Studies / M. A. (English)

Aspects of memory and identity with reference to the prose of Dana Snyman will be reflected in this research report. Concepts from memory studies, such as cultural and collective memory, collective identity as well as nostalgia and loss will serve as the matrix for a reading of his narratives. The reception of Weg, an Afrikaans outdoor magazine (and specifically the contri- butions by Snyman) amongst readers typified as the Weg-generation will be studied. Since the political transformation of 1994, there has been a renewed attempt by Afri- kaners to explore their identity and status in the new dispensation. Snyman’s nostalgic representation of this process can be linked to a current trend in Afrikaans literature where identity and roots are explored in order to redefine Self and Other. His stories document the Afrikaner culture of a bygone era with a view of coming to terms with that past. / Afrikaans / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans))

Brian John Hooper. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-149). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Preface --- p.iv / Introduction --- p.vi / Chapter Chapter One: --- """The Matrix and Fusion in Hong Kong Anglophone Literature""" --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- """The Matrix and its Malcontents in Acheson's Flagrant Harbour´ح" --- p.39 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- """Lee's Running Dog´ح" --- p.65 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- """Mo's Signifying Monkey King""" --- p.76 / Conclusion --- p.106 / Bibliography --- p.109

This thesis is a feminist reading of the work of Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946), which considers her four major novels: Maurice Guest (1908), The Getting of Wisdom (1910), The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), and The Young Cosima (1939). It proposes that Richardson foregrounds the work of gender ideology in her novels, and that her work is also conscious about its own fictional procedures. This thesis argues that Richardson consciously examines the ideological aspect of narrative modes, such as naturalism, the Bildungsroman, and popular romance. Moreover, it illustrates her attempts to invent narrative strategies which subvert the conventional assumptions about gender inherent in those forms. ???Gender Ideology and Narrative Form??? draws on recent theoretical approaches to narrative, ideology, subjectivity, and dialogism, to argue that Richardson makes the ideological shaping of her stories most visible through manipulations of genre, plot, narrative voice, and point of view. Aspects of ideology examined include the Victorian and late-Victorian equation of masculinity with public rationality, mind, public achievement, and genius: and, on the other hand, the association of femininity with the body, passion, and private or domestic spaces. The thesis also considers some of the values and assumptions about gender implicit in nineteenth-century scientific thinking. Henry Handel Richardson has been viewed as a conservative writer, in both aesthetic and political terms. By contrast, I suggest that she resists the moral and representational codes of the realist or naturalist form, and that her uncompromising oppositional strategy achieves a number of radical results. It exposes and criticises the masculinist bias of certain representational methods; it offers new ways of representing female experience; and it insists that the private sphere must be treated also as a political space in which crucial power relationships are at work. My approach to Henry Handel Richardson???s fiction opens new ways to see her work as the product of a distinctive feminist consciousness.

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