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This PhD thesis proposes an Irish-Scottish comparative framework for examining a range of shared ethical, socio-political and theoretical concerns, pertaining to aspects of class and gender, in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature. My approach galvanises Lévinasian ethics with the socio-cultural category of the ‘subaltern’ in relation to postcolonial, Marxist and feminist theories in order to trace what I term a ‘subaltern aesthethics’ between selected works of Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writing that show a specific sensibility to the social inequalities and inequities that are part of the current restructuring of the global capitalist system. My work explores how these texts engage with both the processes of political and economic transformation in the Atlantic archipelago, and critical-theoretical approaches which, I argue, show the tendency to subsume the specificity and intensity of subaltern concerns. The first chapter delineates key debates in Irish and Scottish studies, offering a critique of conventional applications of postcolonial and postmodern theory. I demonstrate that dominant versions of postcolonialism are analytically entrapped in the nation as a paradigm. Additionally, I show that for all its apparent celebration of difference, postmodernism reduces otherness to the terms of the self. Chapter 2 outlines the model of a subaltern counter-history as a theoretical framework for reading ethical issues of historicity on the basis of texts by James Kelman, Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson. This engagement with history is continued in chapter 3, which investigates the desire to archive Northern Ireland’s recent past in the context of its peace process in Glenn Patterson’s and Eoin McNamee’s recent novels. The emphasis of the three subsequent chapters turns the attention of my counter-historical method to issues of gender. The fourth chapter evaluates the material consequences that the gendering of the imagined nation has on female bodies in particular. Whereas the focus lies here specifically on the Irish context, the following chapter 5 engages in a comparative reading of traumatic herstories in three Irish and Scottish novels by Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway and Jennifer Johnston. The purpose of both of these chapters is to examine women’s experience of disempowerment and their struggle to reclaim agency. My last chapter then investigates the relationship between men, gender and nation in the allegorical imagiNation of Alasdair Gray and McCabe with specific regard to the turn to the feminine that has taken place in contemporary criticism.

Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James's "center of consciousness," to E. M. Forster's theory of "round" and "flat," to Deidre Lynch's "pragmatics of character," to Alex Woloch's influential "one versus many," scaled distinctions between "major" and "minor" characters have remained unchallenged since the Poetics. Yet such classifications don't capture the ways characters claim amounts of interest and consequence that are disproportionate to their textual presence. My book counters these approaches to character by calling attention to how novels concisely render the rich interior fullness of even very minor figures. While literary critics associate representations of consciousness with major characters, I demonstrate that, through the application of narrative techniques such as first-person narration and focalization, the limited amounts of text allotted to minor characters can yield brief flashes of depth. These depictions of consciousness may lack the "exhaustive presentation" that Ian Watt claims is inherent to the novel, but they are nonetheless brimming with the personality and specificity critics typically associate with central characters. Indeed, many canonical novels, especially those of literary realism's highpoint in nineteenth-century Britain, resist the character hierarchy implied by distinctions such as major and minor. In addition to manifest examples such as Wilkie Collins's "experiment" with many narrators in The Woman in White (1859), we can count instances in which the centrality of a major character is disrupted or challenged. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), where the title character's initial prominence is undermined by his creature's arresting autobiography, to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readerly affections are split between a Jewish hero, an egoistic heroine, and a narrator's attempt to relate "everything" to "everything else," novels that are far from generic outliers fit uneasily into scaled models of characterization, even when their titles and critics imply otherwise. By recuperating the significance of representations of minor characters' consciousnesses, I argue that such novels disrupt the impulse for sustained identification with a single exceptional perspective, directing attention towards characters who might otherwise appear nondescript, inscrutable, threatening, or even inhuman. My rethinking of minor characters' interior fullness allows me to reframe our understanding of the social purpose that Victorian authors such as Dickens and Eliot claim for the novel. As Eliot suggests in "The Natural History of German Life" (1856), literature should "amplif[y] experience and exten[d] our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot," resisting stock figures and stereotypes to produce a form of social sympathy that is deliberate, sustained, and self-reflective. This view of the novel's morally instructive capacity is refracted in recent arguments by scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, who claims that readers' involvement with the novel's prolonged form and involved descriptions cultivates their ethical imagination. Yet both Eliot and latter-day critics suspect that the readerly experience of identifying with characters impedes the novel's social utility: the narrator in Middlemarch (1871-2) must ask "But why always Dorothea" of its likeable heroine, while Wayne Booth describes identification as an "immature" approach to literature that occludes "aesthetic experience." Character, however, is not always so all-consuming. I argue that both the brevity and the sheer numerousness of depictions of minor characters' consciousness make them the locus of novels' engagement with socially-oriented sympathy. By countering a protagonist's too-engrossing psychology with many full conscious centers, minor characters both mark and extend beyond novels' textual limits. In their ability to encompass and briefly reorient themselves around these many rich individual points, nineteenth-century novels themselves come to embody an ideally sympathetic perspective: capacious, inclusive, and free of excessive partiality.

Aleksandra Hajduczek

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 251 p. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor:, Dept. of. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-245).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 221-231). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-204).

<p> In this thesis, I expand considerations of diaspora as not only a migration of people and cultures but a migration of thought. Specifically, I demonstrate that literary representations of diaspora produce what I consider to be an epistemological migration, challenging the idea that race and culture are stable and impermeable and offering instead racial and cultural fluidity. I assert that this causal relationship is best exemplified by narratives of racial passing written by diasporic writers. Using Homi Bhabha&rsquo;s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, I analyze Helen Oyeyemi&rsquo;s <i> Boy, Snow, Bird</i> and Zo&euml; Wicomb&rsquo;s <i>Playing in the Light</i>, arguing that <i>Boy, Snow, Bird</i>&rsquo;s narrative form is a form of mimicry that repeats European and African literary traditions and subverts Eurocentrism, while <i>Playing in the Light</i> is a &ldquo;Third Space&rdquo; in which to accept notions of the non-categorical fluidity of race. Through this analysis, I draw particular attention to Oyeyemi&rsquo;s and Wicomb&rsquo;s unique abilities to refract notions of race, rather than presumably reflect a system of strict categories, and, ultimately, I argue that these novels transcend the realm of literature, existing as empowering calls for society&rsquo;s modifications of its racial perceptions.</p><p>

<p>LeJeune, Jeff. Bachelor of Science, McNeese State University, 2001; Master of Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2017. Major: English Title of Thesis: ?The Violent Take It by Force?: Heathcliff and the Vitalizing Power of Mayhem in Wuthering Heights Thesis Chair: Dr. Christine DeVine Pages in Thesis: 92; Words in Abstract: 284 ABSTRACT In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte employs the character Heathcliff as both a real and mythic being in order to challenge class conventions in Victorian society. She shares this societal contention with other Victorian novelists, but where her contemporaries are typically realistic in their works, Bronte creates a concurrent mythic realm alongside the real in order to allow Heathcliff the space and license to be a Revenant, a symbol used in the folk tradition of the Scots, which I contend was a likely influence on Bronte?s work. Heathcliff?s real nature clashes with this symbolic one, especially when reality will not allow him to be with Catherine, the woman he loves. Her rejection of him serves two central purposes: 1) for the author to spotlight the arbitrary nature of the class system and the decisions individuals make inside it; and 2) for the author to provide a pivot point in the story at which she transforms Heathcliff from a real character to a mythic one. Heathcliff spends the latter half of the novel exacting redemptive punishment on all who have wronged him (and the marginalized he represents), including Catherine herself, a reality he struggles with because he still loves her despite her class-motivated marriage to the hated Edgar Linton. In the end, Heathcliff transgresses his symbolic purpose by going too far in punishing the innocent Hareton, at which point Bronte has him die as unceremoniously as she did Catherine earlier in the novel. Young Hareton and Cathy?s relationship is the fruit of the Revenant Heathcliff?s redeeming work, an ending that, for Bronte, seems to merge more than just the two houses; it seems to also reconcile divergent and conflicting ways of thinking inside the class system.

Recent new historicist accounts of the theatricality of power in early modern culture have often neglected issues of gender and sexuality despite the fact of four decades of female rule and the pervasiveness of images of female sexuality in cultural discourses on theatricality and power. This study of four early Jacobean Shakespearean tragedies--Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus--reveals intimate connections between early modern culture's conceptions of power and its notions of female sexuality. Specifically, early modern constructions of the state as a family together with the concept and practice of a theatrical monarchy aligns the women in these tragedies with contemporary definitions and practices of power. In addition, reading these plays against a variety of other cultural discourses on women reveals glaring contradictions between various discourses on women and the possibilities for female power signalled by those inconsistencies. Reversing current notions of discontinuous identity or postmodern subjectivity as disempowering in denying agency, this dissertation seeks to redefine female agency and asserts that the intrinsic contradictions in representations of women open up the possibilities for female power. By highlighting their constructedness as theatrical creations, the discontinuities inherent in female characters in these plays signals a subversive site for empowerment in a culture which saw inconsistency and theatricality as constitutive of power.