This thesis is a feminist interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s treatment of Shakespeare in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. Although Woolf’s admiration of Shakespeare is evident in both texts, Woolf’s identification of Shakespeare as a gender-neutral or feminist-friendly writer must be qualified. Woolf presents Shakespeare as a worthy but incomplete artistic model, for his work does not explore women with adequate complexity. In these texts, Woolf partially “writes with” Shakespeare, but she also uses his literary works and his status as a cultural icon both to critique the conventional treatment of women as limited by the male perspective and to highlight the gender privilege male writers have historically had. In these two texts, Woolf presses beyond what she perceives to be Shakespeare’s limited exploration of women, ultimately calling for a feminist re-evaluation of gender roles in literature and emphasizing the need for women writers to record women’s experiences.

This dissertation examines Mark Twain’s literary-critical reputation from the years 1865 to 1882, as he transformed from the regional “wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” to a national and international celebrity who William Dean Howells called “the most popular humorist who ever lived.” This dissertation considers “Mark Twain” not as the name of a literary author, but as a fictional creation who was narrator and implied author of both fictional and non-fiction texts, a performer who played his role on lecture platforms and other public venues, and a celebrity whose fame spread from the American west through America and the world. The key question of this dissertation is the historical position of the “humorist,” a hierarchical cultural category that included high culture literary figures, such as James Russell Lowell and Bret Harte; literary comedians, such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby; and clowns and minstrels, who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. I argue that Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the canonical literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular. Through the success of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and the promotion of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was elevated into critical discussions of literary value, and in the 1870s he entered into venues of higher prestige: so-called “quality” magazines such as the Galaxy and the Atlantic Monthly, lecture stages on the lyceum circuit and in England, and the personal realm of friendship with other authors. While Twain was accepted into some literary cultures, other critics attempted to consign him to literary oblivion, or simply ignored him, while Twain himself betrayed keen anxiety about his role as “stripèd humorist” in respectable literary realms. This dissertation thus focuses on written works, critical interpretations, and performative instances in which “Mark Twain,” as both agent and subject, brought debates over “American Humor,” “American Literature,” and “American Culture” to the fore. / text

C. S. Lewis is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but Lewis’s poetry tends to be treated separately from his other works, or as an antecedent to his more famous prose works. This thesis shows that Lewis’s paradoxical views of literary history, cultural death, reason and imagination are reflected in his narrative poems. George Watson says that Lewis was “a paradoxical thing, a conservative iconoclast, and he came to the task well-armed” (1). He is both a traditionalist and a rebel against his times. I explain Lewis’s paradoxes in terms of the concepts of history, memory, reason and imagination, and show that Lewis’s position was a negotiation of his own historical and cultural context. Lewis’s poems and scholarly work indicate that his approach to historical terms is first to underline divergence, and then to emphasize a use of seemingly polarized terms in order to unify them.

My thesis seeks to challenge the existing understanding of the relationship between Romanticism and Post-Modernism in order to put into question the traditional historiographical view of the division of literary history into a series of discrete epochs, each one consecutive to the passing away of the other. My methodology devolves upon a close reading and analysis of the work of three writers and philosophers: the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the 'Post-Modern' French feminist writer Helene Cixous and the 'Romantic' philosopher and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through my examination of the oeuvres of these three writers I seek to demonstrate that, in the domain of subjectivity, there is a strong commonality of approach to the question of the construction of the subject in despite of the gulf of time that separates them. In this way I demonstrate that the historiographical approach, which involves the fissuring of the works of writers and philosophers into discrete historical events, is fundamentally susceptible of being put into question.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-06-28Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:47:27Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 bressan_ic_me_assis.pdf: 521086 bytes, checksum: e01b2a4bcdd2b284ba37d356c82e03d8 (MD5) / O presente trabalho tem por objetivo central a leitura da obra do historiador e crítico literário Afrânio Coutinho (1911-2000), bem como a apresentação de seu método crítico, ressaltando o seu pensamento a respeito da literatura como fenômeno estético, fugindo da abordagem positivista, que estudava o fenômeno literário a partir de valores extrínsecos como a biografia do autor, o contexto histórico no qual este estava inserido, dentre outros, sem levar em consideração os fatores intrínsecos do mesmo. Além disso, traça-se um panorama analítico das histórias de literatura brasileira publicadas antes e depois d'A Literatura no Brasil, com considerações a respeito de seus autores. Motivou a realização do trabalho, a necessidade sentida de uma releitura da obra de Afrânio Coutinho, salientando que A Literatura no Brasil, sua principal obra, é um projeto escrito a várias mãos, o que faz dela um vasto painel de múltiplas visões, que leva o leitor à absorção de um número maior de pontos-de-vista a respeito do fato literário. / The present dissertation has the work of the literary critic and history scholar Afrânio Coutinho (1911-2000) as its central point, as well as the presentations of his critical method, emphasizing his thoughts about literature as an esthetic phenomenum, leaving behind the positivist approach which studied the literary work from extrinsic values like the author's biography, the historical context in which the work was inserted, among other values, without taking its intrinsic values into account. Besides this, an analytical map of the histories of the Brazilian literature published before and after. A Literatura no Brasil is done, with considerations about its authors. The need to reread the work of Afrânio Coutinho motivated the accomplishment of the dissertation, emphasizing the A Literatura no Brasil, his main work, is a project written by many hands, which makes it a vast panel of multiple visions, that leads the reader to the absorption of a larger number of point-of-view concerning the literary act.

The Victorian era was the 'Golden Age' for Shakespeare illustration. Between 1939 and 1880 thousands of illustrations were produced within many different editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works. What is so fascinating about these illustrations is that they have, historically, been widely neglected by academic scholarship. These editions, which were hugely popular in the Victorian era, are a very important part of our cultural heritage and, indeed, our construction of Shakespeare's plays as we understand them today. The 'Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive' is centered on the four major Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works and makes available online over 3000 of these illustrations in an open-access database. The archive is available online at 'ShakespeareIllustration.org' and will allow researchers and members of the public to explore a rich image archive and to ask new questions about this material: for example, 'how did the Victorians portray certain characters and plays pictorially and does this portrayal differ throughout the Victorian era?' Alongside such questions, the archive, more broadly, allows users to explore and interrogate the complex relationship that exists between the page and the stage, between word and image and between the past and the present. Underpinning the project is my strong belief that an online academic resource can be both scholarly rigorous and user-friendly. Further, the archive uses social networking to enable a community of users to discuss the images and to collaborate in exciting new and unforeseen ways. This thesis explores the implications around the creation of such work.

This project seeks to explore representations of Holocaust perpetrators in literature. Such texts, often rather controversially, seek to undo the myth of “pure evil” that surrounds the Holocaust and to reconstruct the perpetrator in more “human” terms. Accordingly, significant questions of “how” and “why” are centralised and explored, providing fertile ground for examinations of the intersections between ethics, literature and history, and enabling ongoing discussions about the characteristics and obligations of perpetrator literature as a whole. Of central concern, these humanising discourses place emphasis on the contextual or situational factors that led up to the genocide. Following these issues through to their logical conclusion, this project takes the question of determinism seriously. This is not to suggest that it disavows individual responsibility, merely that it engages fully with the philosophical problems that are invoked through allusions to external influences, especially as they relate to ideas of contingency. A significant consequence of these discussions is the impact that they have on the reader. That is because, since situational aspects are featured so heavily in these narratives, questions are raised about his or her own capacity for wrongdoing. Consequently, the reader is drawn into the narrative as a potential perpetrator. The tensions that this creates constitutes the second major focus of this work. Ultimately, I hope to expose the challenges that face the reader when they encounter perpetrator narratives, and the ways in which these tensions impact upon our understandings of these figures, and of the Holocaust more generally. In order to provide a more comprehensive overview this project makes use of a large number (in excess of sixty) primary sources, examining both fictional and non-fictional accounts. My aim is not to offer close literary analyses of each of the texts under consideration but, rather, to trace paradigms across the full spectrum of perpetrator literature. In this way, I hope to contribute to the growing body of literature that engages with this topic.

This thesis offers a theoretically-aware discussion of the stage appropriations of Gothic novels and dramas in the 1790. Works discussed in detail include: *The Monk*, *The Romance of the Forest*, *The Castle Spectre* and their adaptations, re-writings and afterlives. The author examines many intersemiotic practices in the above works as well as in several others, drawing her examples from the whole Georgian period; she also explains the signifying function of costuming, lighting, music and special effects in Gothic. The concepts of intertheatricality and infratheatricality, and their relavance to Gothic are addressed in order to attempt a new definition of the genre.

The aim of this thesis is to amalgamate philosophy and history of science with literature to achieve an overview of changing ideas of the animal/human divide during the nineteenth century. Drawing on the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche, Julia Kristeva and Giorgio Agamben. I consider this divide and its contents, often regarded as an abyss. The study is written like a time line, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century and finishing at the end. I split the nineteenth century into four time periods centred around the emergence of Darwinian theory, considered by this study to be the single most prolific scientific event to have occurred during the nineteenth century. These time frames are the pre-Darwinian, the early Darwinian, the late Darwinian and the post-Darwinian. The study is split into four chapters which coincide with these time frames, covering four different novels which exemplify contextually relevant ideas of the abyss. These are Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. During the course of this study I consider various ideas applied by the authors about the abyssal limits and what they consist of. These include considerations on reason, society, morality and spirituality, all ideas used in various different manners to attempt to explain the abyss. From these various deliberations I formulate a conclusion which takes into account the various nuances which would have effected each of the writer’s formulations of the abyss.

The dementias are illnesses which have significant cultural prominence and feature in a wide range of contemporary writing, often as a trope for old age. This thesis examines how stories of dementia are told in fiction and in the clinic. To do this, the work uses Arthur Frank's socio-narratology to examine twelve selected texts in which a key protagonist has dementia. Three of the selected texts have been written by authors with direct experience of dementia within their family and form a subset of texts, memoir fiction. How stories of dementia are told is considered by examining the clinic as a storytelling venue, the creation of faux medical notes from information in the texts and a Triple Analysis of the memoir fiction using three reading templates. The templates have been created from clinical practice, using the questions posed by Frank's socio-narratological practice of Dialogical Narrative Analysis, and using the parameters of Rita Charon's version of Close Reading drill in Narrative Medicine. The work is informed by autoethnography which uses my position as a clinician and reader to examine how fiction has been used in my clinical practice and how it informs my reading of the selected texts.