This dissertation explores the experience of modernity outside of Europe by considering the portrayal of the railway in selected literature of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. I examine what I see as a mutually constitutive process: the way subjectivity is constructed within modernity, and the way modernity, in turn, transforms as it travels to the “periphery.” My dissertation explores these transformations by looking at the way people inhabit, resist and remake the spaces in and around the railway. Using literary works by Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane, Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and selected South Asian writers, I consider the place of aesthetics and representation in this process. I argue that all these authors contribute to a genre that might be called postcolonial modernism, literature from the Third World that is both creating and responding to the advent of modernity. Chapter One provides an overview of theories of modernity. My discussion brings together those critics who theorize modernity primarily within the Western context and those who have opened a discussion of alternative modernities. Chapter Two introduces contemporary theories of space as a way to explore how modernity travels. Looking specifically at spaces of the railway, I consider how modernity is realized through material and imaginative practices. Chapter Three focuses on Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood (1960), and demonstrates how the novel's conflict between generations during the colonial period reveals two relationships to modernity that coexist in the colonial setting. My fourth chapter brings the discussion to the context of South Asia and the literature of partition, including Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956). I argue that these Indian and Pakistani writers represent the railway as a contradictory space traversing a geography fragmented by communal allegiances. Chapter Five analyzes Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's epic poem Human Landscapes (1950), written during a period of intense national modernization. I present Hikmet's view of modernity as an ambivalent one, representing the altered modes of perception brought by modern technology at the same time underscoring, through his portrayal of the Turkish peasantry, the fact that modernity has not fulfilled its promise of emancipation.

This study examines adoption in a range of twentieth-century American cultural texts: novels, plays and films. Adoption narratives, I argue, hold in relief the process through which individuals are recognized within the public discourse of family and community. Both highly regulated and elusive, adoption enables individuals to assume "normal" (legitimate) roles within their adoptive families while obscuring their "spurious" (illegitimate) origins. How adoptive subjects are recognized in society depends ultimately on their ability or willingness to perform the rhetoric of legitimacy. Not only do citational practices enact adoptive identities, but the rhetoric of legitimacy naturalizes this process by referring obliquely to biology as the model for relatedness. This linguistic component serves to complicate identity issues faced by displaced subjects who must forge so-called unnatural social relations, adoptive bonds that mimic the biological. In this way, adoption reminds us that even biological kinship is wrought through language and configured as primal. While I focus mainly on literal adoptees, characters newly placed or caught between families, I recognize an important link between these characters and more symbolic adoptees, individuals who are culturally displaced or politically dispossessed. Adoption in literature works to expose rents in the social fabric, places where issues of belonging are in dispute. I begin my analysis by examining the force of records to determine characters in works by William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich. In both cases, culture mediates the efficacy of record-keeping and the dissemination of identity. From here, I explore more directly the fluidity of cultural claims made by adoptees in works by Bharati Mukherjee and Leslie Marmon Silko. I examine the performative function of adoption in plays by Edward Albee and John Guare. And finally, I focus on "the face of adoption," by examining how adoption materializes in recent Hollywood films. This study initiates connections between adoption and issues of difference and diversity by exploring the way culture and language converge in the expression of the adoptive subject.

This dissertation examines canonical female figures throughout Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and Contemporary British and American literature who are single mothers. Historical research is combined with Freudian, Jungian and feminist psychoanalytic criticism to provide insight into the mythic and subconscious impetus for the creation of these characters as well as a real life context. The purpose of this discussion is to explore the position in society that these women hold, the range of their power, and, if possible, explore the reaction each character has to her position as single parent. The dissertation works chronologically, beginning in Chapter One with Grendel's Dam in Beowulf, Spenser's Errour in The Faerie Queene, and Milton's Sin in Paradise Lost as examples of monster mothers spawning illegitimate and unnatural children. Are they are monsters first, or monsters because they reproduce without sanction? Chapter Two explores the widow's world during the Renaissance and Jacobean period, with a focus on the dramas All's Well That Ends Well and Coriolanus by William Shakespeare and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. Financial power and unleashed sexuality are in conflict with patriarchal laws of inheritance. Chapter Three promotes Helen Graham of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, as openly choosing their single parent status. The benefit and cost of their uncomfortable choice is outlined. Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth provides a "moral" balance to the rebellion advocated in the previous works. Chapter Four examines the preoedipal mother and the double bind of the Victorian "angel in the house." Abandonment, murder and baptism appear in George Eliot's Adam Bede, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Chapter Five analyzes the voice and power of contemporary single mothers. Works include, Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing", Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The seeming dysfunction of single mother homes and the intrusion of patriarchal institutions are explored.

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This study of the "prosaics" of allegory in Perez Galdos's novels examines the relationship between allegory at its most formally elemental and prose realism at its most complex. The first chapter introduces the major lines of philosophical, rhetorical, hermeneutic, and deconstructionist thinking in modern approaches to allegory, from the Romantics to Paul de Man, and illustrates various ways in which allegory's formal structures serve as the figural and morphological underwriters of Galdos's narrative fictions. Chapter II uses a single tropological occasion in Galdos's Miau to develop a realist's revisionistic equation, in which the authoritative and morphologically deterministic structures of typology are compounded by modern intertextuality and the figural structures of metonymy and metaphor. Dante's Inferno supplies the allegorical subtext for the tropological occasion in question, and in that fashion is introduced the master allegorist whose authoritative traces will serve as allegorical tracking points in each of the study's subsequent chapters. Nicolai Gogol and Charles Dickens provide control texts by which to gauge the innovative subtlety with which Galdos articulates his stylistic equation. Chapter III explores the role of personification allegory in construing a metaphysics of fictional character. Galdos's dialogue novel Realidad, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, Prudentius's Psychomachia, and Dante's Inferno provide opportunities for speculation about about reductivity and complexity in realistic characterization. The fourth chapter takes Galdos's Torquemada tetralogy as the basis for comment upon realistic fictions as allegories of epochal thinking. Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme" opens the way for a discussion of the epochal disjunction in that novel series between Comtian positivism and Dantean allegory--a disjunction between system and synthesis. The fifth and final chapter draws upon allegory to propose a theory of the management of narrative time in realism. The theory suggests allegory as the underwriter of several narrative time codes that work against the impulse of chronology in prose narrative. Galdos's short novel Tristana is considered as an allegory of time--historical time, time detained, and time passing. Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, offers examples of Galdos's deployment of the time codes under consideration.

Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Tiutchev were steeped in the ideals of the German Romantic movement, towards which both writers display a particular affinity. This movement had a significant impact on contemporary Russian culture, which was pulling a variety of heterogeneous elements into its vortex. Taking this affinity into account, this dissertation offers a new reading of Gogol's last book, Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends. In order to clarify the structure of Selected Passages and to demonstrate that language is central to Gogol's Weltanschauung, his early works are first examined. Right from the start, the importance of language and the search for an individual idiom is announced in Gogol's writings. Selected Passages is considered in its entirety. A structural analysis of the book's composition reveals an implicit theory of language underlying the sequence of its parts. Gogol views the contemporary state of language as corrupt and leading to spiritual death. The redemption of humanity is possible only if the original purity of language is restored. Thus, Gogol advocates a regressive movement towards the pure, God-given Word. Gogol insists that the Russian language is undergoing an acute crisis. He foresees a way out of this crisis through the emergence of a new poetic language that will partake not only of the Russian literary language, but of other sources of inspiration as well. Tiutchev's poetry represents just such a language, and is thus one manifestation of Gogol's linguistic advocacy. Introducing a new aesthetic into Russian prosody, Tiutchev opened new vistas for poetry and the Russian language. A comparison between Tiutchev and the German Romantic poet Eichendorff reveals striking similarities between the two poets. This similarity is not to be seen as an instance of one poet influencing the other, but rather that both are responding, to an astonishing degree, to the same aesthetic values.

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Thèse lettres Paris. / Réimpr. en facs. de l'éd. de Paris : H. Champion, 1927 BN.

Proefschrift--Nijmegen. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Amsterdam. / Errata-slip inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-146).