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The Catherine Byron Letters is an edited and annotated collection of letters mostly exchanged between Catherine Byron, the mother of the poet, and her solicitor John Hanson. The importance of this correspondence was first established by Doris Langley-Moore in Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (1974), which documents the poet's finances from the time of his birth. Since then the letters have been used extensively by Megan Boyes in My Amiable Mamma: A Biography of Mrs. Catherine Gordon Byron (1991) and by J. V. Beckett and Sheila Aley in Byron and Newstead: The Aristocrat and the Abbey (2001). For this project I have transcribed and edited the portion of Catherine Byron's correspondence now in the John Murray Archives at the National Library of Scotland, amounting to 92 letters which are here reproduced in their entirety. While some are familiar letters, most of the correspondence is concerned with the business of providing for the young poet's education at Harrow and at Cambridge, paying off his mounting debts, managing the Newstead Abbey estate, and pursuing the lawsuits which entangled the family finances. I have edited the transcribed letters using the TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) markup language, adding optional punctuation where necessary to clarify the sense as well as headnotes and additional annotations for personal names, places, and technical terms where they require elucidation. The resulting machine-readable XML documents have been made into a website on which I have collaborated with Professor Radcliffe. / Master of Arts

A large number of recent scholarship in (American) literary and cultural studies is devoted to describing the contemporary moment as a monumental break from the previous (or current) period, postmodernism, by hailing our contemporary times as the era of post-postmodernism, late postmodernism, metamodernism, cosmodernism, or of a similarly termed construction. In these different proclamations, we recognize a pervasive tendency to periodize, an attempt to separate phases of human existence and cultural creation into neat stages that ‘logically’ follow after one another to form a supposedly coherent narrative. This practice of periodizing comes with a number of pitfalls that many of these studies seem not fully aware of, and it in turn speaks to (and characterizes) the contemporary moment as one marked by a desire for the boundedness of such clear divisions. In the following pages, we chronicle the quandaries that follow from such implicit and explicit efforts of periodization by focalizing them through three different ‘creation myths’ of the contemporary that such efforts at periodization typically subscribe to. As a way of sidestepping these, we accentuate the strengths of more ‘local’ critical lenses, approaches that historicize without periodizing. As one such lens, we suggest to engage the contemporary moment through the ‘poetics of politics,’ a historical discursive formation in which literary and popular texts’ desire for political relevance is matched by a recognition, in politics, of the (meta)textual quality of political action.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

My thesis, Literary Citizenship and the Politics of Language: The Galician Literary Field between 1939 and 1965, is the first attempt to examine the building process of Galician national literature by focusing on one of its constitutive elements, the linguistic criterion. Drawing on Mario Santana's concept of literary citizenship, which can be defined as membership of a literary community, it pays attention to the development of the idea that Galician literary citizenship is language specific, in other words, that to be a member of the national literature, writers have to write in Galician. It does so by focusing on one of the most neglected periods in Galician and Spanish Studies (1939–1965). Chapter one, 'Going Public: The Adventure of Galician Publishing, 1939–1965', presents the first ever account of the publishing world in the studied period. Chapter two, 'From Region to Nation: Galician Literary Studies', argues that the main battleground in the definition of Galician literary citizenship was the field of Galician literary studies, where the concept of literary citizenship was naturalised and then institutionalised. Chapter three, 'Negotiating Identities', explores writers' language choices, paying special attention to those who wished to earn a language-specific Galician literary citizenship. Apart from native and exophonic writers, the chapter addresses writers who did so through translation. Chapter four, 'No Man's Land: Female Writing and Language', argues that female writers had a double-edged experience in the literary field. The patriarchal literary institutions were interested in their symbolic capital but they exercised firm control over them. The conclusion, 'A New raison d'être for Galician Literary Studies', summarises the main argument put forward by this thesis, that to understand fully the development of Galician literary citizenship, literature must be studied outside the national framework.

Ph.D. University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2012 / This thesis studies the readership of literature that was banned under the various laws that comprised the censorship system, focusing on the apartheid period, from the 1950s until the early 1990s. It investigates the conditions under which banned and subversive literature existed in the underground network despite the ever-looming censorship apparatus. It is based on theories drawn from the history of the book, sociology of literature, South African literary histories, and on data from secondary and primary sources such as archival material and interviews with, and testimonies from, readers. This thesis focuses on the roles of readers in alternative circuits, by examining the modalities of sourcing, distributing, reading and sharing of imported and local banned publications. It seeks to demonstrate that readers did read banned books and books likely to be banned, showing creativity in the various strategies used to get these books into the country and to share them amongst the largest number of readers, using texts in various fashions, and actively participating to the South African literary industry and broader socio-political affairs.

This thesis explores the representation of conspiracy in the literature of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its engagement with conspiracy thinking, with particular reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Sand (1804-1876). In providing the first sustained scholarly exploration of conspiracy and cultural production in nineteenth-century France, it situates the novel within wider discourses on European political history in the years leading up to the upheaval of 1848. Through close readings of Balzac and Sand's common investment in conspiracist modes of explanation, this study makes the case for a new generic category, the novel of conspiracy, around which literary poetics, historical imagination and political fantasy come to coalesce. Chapter one proposes a re-evaluation of the dialectic between models of surface and depth reading in Balzac's Une ténébreuse affaire (1841), arguing that the conspiratorial landscape of this proto-detective novel belies Balzac's fraught relationship to the severed referentiality of his narrative. As illustration of a Balzacian poetics of conspiracy, Une ténébreuse affaire, it is suggested, points forward in literary history towards the Flaubertian aesthetic of platitude. Chapter two looks to the political criticisms Jacques Rancière makes of Sand's patrician benevolence to inform its reading of Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), which depicts workers' secret societies and the underground networks of Restoration liberalism. Accusations of misguided idealism, this thesis shows, align Rancière's critique and the literary-critical narrative informing Sand's twentieth-century aesthetic devaluation with the reproach that she herself levels at the Carbonarist conspirators of her novel. Chapter three, finally, turns to the alternative origin myth of 1789 that Sand elaborates in Consuelo-La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-44). Her engagement with the founding text of the conspiracist tradition of explanation, it argues, provides the cornerstone for the interrogation of the tensions of a pre-Revolutionary Europe torn between Enlightenment and Illuminism. Framing the Balzacian and Sandian novel as emblematic of a wider discourse on the conspiratorial origins of 1789 has a two-fold advantage. On an immediate level, it nuances received critical ideas on these authors' relationships to history and literary genre (a realist Balzac incapable of looking back further than the Restoration whose demise he so lamented; an idealist Sand too caught up in a utopian future to envisage the historical past). In doing so, this study seeks to problematize the narrative of oppositionality behind the Balzac-Sand binary in terms of which the literary history of nineteenth-century France is habitually couched. Yet, more significantly, it also gestures towards the importance of the conspiratorial as a prism through which to approach the porosity of the very categories of 'literature' and 'history' in the nineteenth-century French context.

This doctoral thesis examines the representations and dynamics of crime and inner punishment in a range of European literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: F.M. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Преступлeние и наказaние, 1866), L. Rebreanu’s Ciuleandra (1927) and P. Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), while tracing the developments of crime fiction and the changes in criminal legal system over the span of one hundred and nineteen years. Utilising the methodology of comparative literature, I argue that the interiorized punishment - which I identify, after Foucault, as a new episteme - is a narrative thread that runs through all three novels, and informs much other writings in the same period. Informed by different socio-cultural, temporal, political, and stylistic backgrounds, each novelist utilizes distinct narrative techniques and strategies to configure their protagonists in such a way that permits the reader to get an insight into their psyches. The present study locates the literary tendency to fuse the character of the protagonist/hero and the perpetrator/anti-hero into one narrative entity and examines the literary representation of the factors that trigger the guilt or need for punishment in this entity. To this end, I focus on the narrative structure, temporal framework, geographical setting as well as the protagonists’ relations with other characters within the texts. The idea of self-punishment, its representations and manifestations, is explored through the lens of psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Otto Rank. My psychoanalytical readings of the texts are furthermore complemented by the theoretical frameworks offered by Mikhail Bakhtinʼs theory of polyphony, Linda Hutcheonʼs account of historiographic metafiction and relevant philosophical perspectives such as Søren Kierkegaardʼs and Jean-Paul Sartreʼs existentialisms.

This dissertation examines how the new “multicultural phase” anthologies of American literature treat American history. Anthologies of American literature are more historical, more diverse, and more multidisciplinary than ever before, but they have over-extended themselves in both their historical and representational reach. They are not, despite their diversity and historicism, effective vehicles for promoting critical discussions of American history in the classroom. Chapter One outlines a brief history of anthologies of American literature, while also introducing the terminology and methodology used in this study. Chapter Two explores the role of the headnote as a vehicle for American history in anthologies by focusing on headnotes to Abraham Lincoln in multiple anthologies. Chapter Three examines how anthologies frame Native American origin stories for their readers. Chapter Four focuses on the issues raised by anthologizing texts originally composed in Spanish, and Chapter Five argues for a transnational broadening of the “slavery theme” in anthologies to include Barbary captivity narratives and texts that reference Indian slavery.

Despite the ubiquity of images depicting disability in the narratives that have contributed to the shaping of Canadian national identity, images of unconventional bodies have not drawn critical attention. My study begins to address this neglect by revisiting selections from Canadas historical literary canon using Disability Studies theory. I examine eight Anglophone novels selected from the reading requirements list for field examinations in Canadian literature at the University of Saskatchewan. Because fictional representations inform the ways we interpret reality, I argue that the application of Disability Studies theories to a Canadian context provides new insights into the meaning of Canadian nationhood. The study begins with Thomas McCulloch. His Stepsure Letters provides a counter-discourse to the commercialized ethos of his time. The disabled Stepsure exemplifies the ideal citizen. While Gwen, in Ralph Connors Sky Pilot, presents a sentimentalized stereotype of disability, her role also foregrounds the imperative of human relationship. Connors Foreigner, on the other hand, intertwines disability with ethnicized difference to form images of subhumanity that the novel suggests must be assimilated and/or controlled. Lucy Maude Montgomerys Emily trilogy echoes Connors later use of disability to embody a sinister Other that threatens the British-Canadian mainstream. In Such Is My Beloved, Morley Callaghan realistically depicts the power investments involved in configuring difference as social menace, defying the eugenic discourse of his day. While Malcolm Rosss As for Me and My House seems to revert to the exploitation of disability as a trope for trouble, at the same time the story subverts convention by failing to affirm normalcy. In Ethel Wilsons Love and Salt Water disability signifies the complexity and depth of humanity. In Mordechai Richlers The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, betrayal and rejection of responsibility to Other is the source of human suffering. The marginalized figures of Adele Wisemans Crackpot, the last novel examined in this study, defy their abject roles, pronouncing the right of being within ones difference.<p>Defamiliarizing the function of portrayals of disability brings into consciousness biases that have been systemically naturalized. Exploring constructions of difference reveals constructions of normalcy. Just as interrogating Whiteness uncovers hidden processes of racism, questioning normalcy illuminates a discriminatory ableism. My reading reveals a struggle within the national imaginary between ableism and a desire for inclusive pluralism. Disability Studies readings may help to liberate the collective psyche from tyrannical impositions of normalcy to a greater realization of the richness of human diversity.