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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 11, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4197. Adviser: Fritz Breithaupt.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4322. Adviser: Harriet Murav. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-193) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-314). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2565. Adviser: Marianne Kalinke. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-211) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This dissertation is a comparative study of the work and ideas of the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) and the American Willa Cather (1873-1947). Their mutual admiration and written correspondence began in the 1920s and culminated during Undset's World War II refugee years in New York, when the two women met and developed a warm friendship. While several scholars are aware of their personal connection, no one has ever examined it. I do not claim that the writers influenced each other's work. Instead I examine the thematic and historical issues that most influenced them and attracted them to each other. Both had a very early devotion to nature, and both contemplated a career in science. At puberty both suffered a traumatic loss--death of a parent for one, removal from Virginia to the prairie for the other--which had a profound impact on their personal and artistic development, particularly around issues of sexuality, commitment, and love. I then explore the ways Undset's and Cather's early writing wrestled with the power of the erotic impulse, its effect on the artist's need for autonomy, and the conflict between the artist's life and socially expected female roles. I discuss the significance of their personal choices--which were reflected in choices made by heroines of their early novels--and place them in the context of Symbolist responses to the social disruptions of the late Victorian era. These include changing attitudes toward sexuality, feminism, art, and idealism, particularly the effect of thinkers like Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud on social attitudes; the apotheosis of Romanticism in the Decadent movement; the emergence of an increasingly mystical politics as the authority of religion waned; and the moral shattering of Western civilizations by World War I. The dissertation concludes at this point, when both women were faced with ruptures in their personal lives, both formally changed their religious affiliations, and both entered the decade in which they produced their most powerful work. Appendices include previously untranslated and unpublished texts (in both languages) of tributes each woman wrote about the other during the last years of their lives.

As the capital of Belgium and the headquarters of the European Union, present-day Brussels is a paradoxical city, defined by its multitude of governmental functions and characterized by its cultural and linguistic ambiguity. The city's history is marked by a unique linguistic metamorphosis that in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed Brussels from a historically Dutch-speaking city into a predominantly Francophone urban setting with an official bilingual status. This study presents a comparative and historically situated analysis of the literary representations of Brussels produced in Flemish literature between 1830 and 1932. It concentrates on the changing position of Dutch in Brussels as a result of the frenchification of the city and the creation of a socio-linguistic urban hierarchy, in which French was the language of the ruling elite and Dutch became considered as an unsophisticated idiom, spoken by the lower classes. The investigative focus of this dissertation is on how Flemish authors have responded to these socio-linguistic developments and in what way these events have shaped their narrative construction of the city. The Flemish urban narratives are examined within the context of Brussels' linguistic, political and cultural history and within the framework of a linguistically polarizing Belgium. The chronological scope of this research begins in 1830 with Belgian independence and ends in 1932 when Brussels officially becomes a bilingual city. Its methodological approach is based on notion of the city as representation and on Michel Foucault's concept of 'heterotopia.' Considering these works of urban literature as heterotopian texts that hold up a critical mirror to the existing urban complexity enables one to recognize their ability to challenge and intervene in dominant urban discourses and to generate new and critical perspectives on the city. The literary representations of Brussels studied in this dissertation represent powerful narrative interventions in the socio-linguistic and political hierarchies that came to define the urban order in Brussels after 1830. The inextricable connection between language and class in Brussels makes these Flemish urban novels imaginative expressions of resistance to the linguistic inequality and social and political discrimination of the city's Dutch-speaking population.

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