This thesis is focused on the new writers who appeared in Shanghai during the Japanese Occupation between December 1941 and August 1945. The rise of these new writers to fame and their subsequent disappearance from the literary scene were consistent with the fall and liberation o f Shanghai. In the meantime, their appearance and disappearance were parallel with the success and decline of magazines published in Shanghai during that period as well. Both the magazines and their editors played significant roles in promoting the new writers into the literary arena. The war disrupted the development of literature, their writing "nourishment" mostly depended on the literary resources which had been stored up in Shanghai since the late Qing. My discussion of these eight new writers, Zhang Ailing, Shi Jimei, Cheng Yuzhen, Tang Xuehua, Zheng Dingwen, Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi, progresses through an analysis of the elements of region, literature, and war. While most of the female writers' themes were focused on love, mundane love or God's love, the male writers were either more interested in setting their stories on Chinese native soil like Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi; or personal concerns and anxieties regarding the future such as Zheng Dingwen. Among her contemporaries, Zhang Ailing is the most successful and the most influential. These new writers did not go through the baptism of the May Fourth Movement, and had less of a moral burden than their predecessors did. Thus they had more freedom to develop their writings— although the freedom was confined due to a depressed political and social climate.

This dissertation comprises a historical survey and thematic analysis of the various regional and temporal expressions of Chinese and Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue (“nativism” or “homeland literature”). Chapter One traces Chinese xiangtu wenxue from the rural stories of Lu Xun through the 1920s generation of writers of xiangtu wenxue (xiangtu zuojia f’g). These writers used two different narrative modes to analyze China’s deepening rural crisis. One of these was the antitraditionalist mode inspired by Lu Xun; the other was a positivist mode formulated from new concepts and intellectual thought prevalent in China at the time of May Fourth (1919). The narrative configuration established by this decade of xiangtu writers is characterized by nostalgia and is based on the migration of the Chinese village intellectual to large urban centres. This configuration set the standard for subsequent generations of writers of xiangtu wenxue who used an urban narrator to describe a rural area which was either the author’s native home, an area he/she knew well or one which was idealized. Chapters Two and Five discuss Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue from the 1920s to the 1970s. The emergence of this fiction is linked with Taiwan’s insecure status in the forum of international relations. In Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue, the countryside is a refuge from the forces of modernization; it is also a storehouse nurturing ancient traditions which are threatened by new and modern ways. Taiwan’s xiangtu writers valorize traditional culture and seek in rural Taiwan a transcendent China predating Taiwan’s invasion by the West. These works are all narrated by an urban narrator who rejects modernity and desires to counteract foreign influences. The focus of Chapter Three is China’s rural regional xiangtu wenxue of the 1930s. In this decade, rural fiction became a general trend in China with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, Japanese aggression and China’s increasing urbanization. The shift away from China’s urban-based fiction is characterized by an increasing concern for the peasants, regional decay under the onslaught of Westernization and the life, customs and lore of China’s hinterland. In many of these regional works, concern for the nation is interwoven with non-nationalistic interests. Chinese xiangtu wenxue of the 1940s and 1950s is discussed in Chapter Four. The xiangtu wenxue of this period took on a distinctly Communist guise in the wake of Mao Zedong’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Chinese Communist xiangtu wenxue is primarily defined as revolutionary realism and is concerned with the construction of Chinese socialism which takes place in the countryside through the forced implementation of draconian Party policies. The peasants in this fiction often attempt to evade these policies. Occasionally, these stories and novels slip into a hardcore realistic mode conveying a peasant reality which strongly dissents from the orthodox Party view. At least one writer of this period was persecuted and killed for his putatively disloyal beliefs. Finally, with the passing of Maoism in China, a new form of xiangtu wenxue emerged in the mid-1980s. This is the subject of Chapter Six. In these works, traditional Chinese culture supercedes Maoism as the basic fabric unifying Chinese life. Many of the writers in this period evince a psychological bifurcation arising from their conflicting views about the value of traditional Chinese culture. This bifurcation stems from the narrator in this fiction who is caught up in the process of urbanization and is unable to fully integrate his vision of the countryside into a larger vision of modernity. The ambivalence about Chinese culture in xiangtu wenxue is a leitmotif which underlies xiangtu wenxue’s many, disparate forms.

This project examines the 'mother-writer problem' within contemporary Canadian fiction by women. Using three novels that tell the story of a mother who is also a writer, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, Audrey Thomas' Intertidal Life and Carol Shields' Unless, I will outline the manner in which the roles of mother and writer are negotiated by the authors and their central characters. Further, I will investigate how creating a narrative about a female artist who is also a mother challenges and changes the structure and content of the standard female kunstlerroman. Finally, this thesis will attempt to determine how or if such challenges and changes improve the portrait-of-the-female-artist novel.

Little is known about the literary quarrel in Quebec between the regionalists and the "exotics". This study, based mainly on a systematic analysis of periodicals, examines in detail and as objectively as possible the different arguments presented by the participants. After outlining the development of the two opposing parties, it describes their confrontation in 1918-1920 and the subsequent diversification that ends the quarrel in the thirties. This conflict can be divided into four distinct periods, beginning with the reaction of critics like Camille Roy and Louis Dantin to Emile Nelligan's poetry in 1904 and going up to the "canadianisme integral" of 1930. The argument concerned much more than literature, having important ideological implications related to French-Canadian nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is in this relationship between literature and French Canadian society that the specific nature of this debate can be £ound.

The thesis explores the vexed concept of Heimat in recent German culture. Heimat evokes an exclusive group, founded on the idea of the unity and homogeneity of its members. Conflicts arise around the concept because it constructs oppositions between those who belong and those who do not, insiders and outsiders, the domestic and known in opposition to the foreign and strange. Historically, the concept has been used to tell a story about the cohesion of the German nation; it has also, however, been used to assimilate, eliminate, or exile its Others. The thesis examines how the legacies of the concept and its narrative reverberate through the nation-building process of Germany today. The concept of Heimat is active in films, literature, the law and contemporary German society. The argument is that the concept of Heimat still shapes German identity in ways that use old forms and oppositions to respond to recent social changes. It is argued further that the tensions around the concept have not diminished, but are spreading into many different areas of German everyday life. Two films by Edgar Reitz provide the starting point for exploring the tensions around Heimat in contemorary German culture. Following readings of texts by Jewish-German, Austrian- German, Swiss-German, Persian-German, Rumanian-German, East and West German authors show the concept persisting in different forms with different consequences, according to the different cultural contexts. In each of these contexts, the concept of German Heimat produces both social cohesion and social tensions. As much as people are united by the concept, they are also driven apart by its differentiating and disintegrating mechanisms. Motivated by the search for communal intimacy, the concept also has the effect of controlling and manipulating what appears different and alien. As such a network of interests and strategies it is not merely closed, fixed and bounded, as desired perhaps by the dominant cultural groups, but rather open for contestation and negotiation within and across national borders.

This dissertation explores the relationship between the regulatory discourses of nationalism and sexuality as they operate in the cultural production and textual dissemination of contemporary Canadian literatures. Applying recent studies in postcolonial and queer theory to a number of works by gay and lesbian authors written across a broad spectrum of years, political perspectives, and genres, I seek to formulate a critical methodology which allows me to situate these works within the trajectory of Canadian canon-formation from the 1940s to the present. In so doing, I argue that the historical construction of Canadian literature and Canadian literary criticism upon an apparent absence of national identity—us encapsulated most tellingly in the "Where is here?" of Frye's "Conclusion"—masks nothing so much as the presence of a subversive and destabilizing sexual identity—"queer." The dissertation is made up of eight chapters: the first opens with a Sedgwickian survey of the "homosocial" underpinnings of several foundational texts of Canadian literature, before providing an overview—via George Mosse, Benedict Anderson, and Michel Foucault—of the theoretical parameters of the dissertation as a whole. Chapter two focuses on three nationally "ambivalent" and sexually "dissident" fictions by Timothy Findley. A comparative analysis of the homophobic criticism accompanying the sexual/textual travels of Patrick Anderson and Scott Symons serves as the basis of chapter three. Chapter four discusses the allegorical function of homosexuality in the nationalist theatre of Michel Tremblay, Rene-Daniel Dubois, and Michel Marc Bouchard. Chapter five examines how national and sexual borderlines become permeable in the lesbian-feminist translation poetics of Nicole Brossard and Daphne Marlatt. Issues of performativity (the repetition and reception of various acts of identification) are brought to the fore in chapters six and seven, especially as they relate to the (dis)located politics of Dionne Brand, and the (re)imagined communities of Tomson Highway and Beth Brant, respectively. Finally, chapter eight revisits some of the vexed questions of identity raised throughout the dissertation by moving the discussion of nationalisms and sexualities into the classroom.

There are two parts to this thesis: a novel, Closing the Circle, and a critical commentary on the process of writing a novel from beginning to end. The novel tells the story of Natasha, a young, late twentieth century woman who searches for her "roots." It begins in southern Alberta and she eventually travels to Eastern Europe where she uncovers the voices in her dreams and from the past. It deals with the metaphysical question of a collective unconscious that houses past symbols pertinent to her search as well as the question as to the validity of dreams and memory in human life. The critical commentary addresses issues involved in writing a fiction vis a vis structure and other literary devices. It also addresses questions that come with taking personal familial historical events and writing them into "story." / 28 cm.

Dramatic literature and film are often political and work to deconstruct and dismantle some of the assumptions of a dominant ideology. Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, show how gender roles are used in oppression and show that other social categories like race, class, and sexuality are interrelated and constructed. This shows the hollowness of the so-called inherent categories that cause “naturalized” divisions between people and groups. Through exploring these works I hope to draw attention to how these artists use theater and film to educate their audiences, as well as challenge them to take control over complicated issues surrounding power and oppression. These writers encourage their audiences to employ social criticism and to re-evaluate the social order that is often naturalized through dominant ideology and discourse. / v, 104 leaves ; 29 cm.

This thesis analyzes the representation of the Shoah in French-language Quebec literature. It first presents the numerous difficulties involved in the fictional representation of this genocide, which relate primarily to writers' authority: lacking the legitimacy of "true" witnesses, writers who address the topic run the risk of betraying the memory of those who were persecuted. The thesis then demonstrates that, despite theoretical obstacles, many novels and poems from Quebec touch upon the Shoah and express a feeling of guilt towards the victims as early as the 1950's. The last chapter postulates that since the 1980's, fiction has acquired a greater legitimacy and narrative forms used to represent the Shoah have diversified, due to the gradual disappearance of direct witnesses as well as the interval of time separating writers from the tragedy.

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