"March 2004" / Errata sheet back page in both volumes. / Bibliography: leaf 65. / 2 v. (v, 65 leaves, 244 leaves) ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, Discipline of English, 2004

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 204-207)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-180). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This study examines four historical novels written by authors from former or existing British colonies, exploring the works' activist potential, that is, their ability to function as more than just escapist reading. The novels' publication dates range over the last two hundred years, allowing the study to investigate changes in how authors use language and structure as tools to raise issues about how history is recorded. After a discussion of the origins and potential cultural work of historical fiction in general, the four novels are discussed in terms of how their styles and structures work to exclude or include certain audiences.The earliest two novels in this study, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), perform and complicate exclusion, reclaiming history by (among other things) taking possession of the language of conquest, English, and using it to push to the periphery the former (or presumptive) rulers of that language and the power associated with its use. Each novel employs a disempowered character who uses a non-standard, hybridized form of English to narrate the story. The editorial apparatus of each novel, which includes prefaces, glossaries, and footnotes, is examined in terms of how it impacts readers' reactions and comprehensionThe two contemporary novels, J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1992), in addition to displaying the formerly silenced perspectives of Others and then enacting their erasure, employ intertextual referencing as a method of exclusion. Each novel's structure uses narrative reiteration as a method for raising questions about perspective and historical truth. Historical novels have been an important tool in generating a cohesive national consciousness in many nations over the past two hundred years. This study investigates how they can also be used to provide alternatives to that monolithic sense of the past when they depict and enact exclusion. / Department of English

Ever since Joseph Conrad chose fin de siecle London as the place to begin and end his Heart of Darkness, the city of London has been host to literary meditations on the darker aspects of empire and imperialism. The decline of the British Empire in the twentieth century has had far-reaching consequences for the former heart of empire. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have transformed Britain into an ethnically and racially diverse nation. The colonies have 'come home to roost.' / Following Conrad's narrative in Heart of Darkness, my thesis begins in London and then moves to the margins of the empire. The long shadow of imperialism shapes the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Bessie Head. In their works these two writers depict the evils of apartheid South Africa and reflect upon the complex psychological mechanisms that underlie encounters between different groups. Such encounters result in a pattern of nonrecognition and misrecognition that in turn create relations based upon domination and servitude. Coetzee's and Head's works speculate on the psychological structures that have shaped the history of colonialism in Africa. / Returning to London, my thesis then examines the works of two writers who combine experience of the colony with knowledge of the centre of Empire. Doris Lessing's experience of coming-of-age in Southern Rhodesia supplies her with powerful insights into both the plight of new immigrants to Britain and the concerns and prejudices of native Londoners. Her knowledge of identity politics in Southern Africa deepens her fictional response to post-war British society. The detective writer Mike Phillips came to Britain from Guyana as a child and he now resides in London. While his novels reflect the concerns of a first-generation black immigrant to the United Kingdom they also depict the challenges and rewards of being black in the London of today.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-62).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-62). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1998. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 282-292).

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