Turn of the century Native American women's published writing is examined for the elements which presage contemporary Native American women's writing. In particular, three writers' works and biographies are examined in order to determine why they wrote, how they wrote and what they wrote. Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Sa and Mourning Dove made early contributions to the field of Native American women's literature.

The Hercules myth has had a long and distinguished literary history, to which this study will add another footnote. In these pages following we shall pursue the figure of Hercules from Greece to Rome to the Middle Ages and thence throughout the Renaissance world---our journey will be somewhat hasty, in the first chapters, but once within the chronological limits of 1400--1600 the text shall linger on the Herculean vistas of Renaissance Italy, France, and England. The goals of this study will be three-fold: First, to establish the traditional interpretative contexts within which Hercules was seen in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; secondly, to trace the appearances of Hercules in the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and thereby to note to what extent these interpretative contexts were applied; and lastly to suggest, in light of the evidence gathered, a tentative clarification of what the Renaissance attitudes were toward pagan mythology and why the chronological limits 1400--1600 are appropriate to designate the core of the "Renaissance." We shall here be primarily concerned with the Hercules myth as it appears in Renaissance non-dramatic poetry and prose.

The story of Philomela and Procne has long been a figure of violence in literature. However, male mythologizers write Philomela out of existence, whereas women writers use the myth as a metaphor for female oppression and silencing. This paper examines the mutually exclusive strategies of Philomela's male and female mythographers. Chapters one through three explore how classical and medieval poets rewrote the myth to sublimate their fear which the story's themes represent. Rendered speechless, hence powerless within a masculine construct, Philomela creates a new idiom and reconstitutes her identity in weaving. Recognizing the immanent consequence of this feminine poetic, male mythologizers, epitomized by Coleridge in the nineteenth century, seek to silence Philomela once and for all. Nevertheless, the Philomela/Procne myth resonates throughout the texts of women. Chapter four analyzes Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers", by Susan Glaspell, revealing the life of a frontier woman domineered by an unyielding husband she finally kills. The male investigators overlook evidence they deem "trifles" because it lies in woman's work. The neighbor women, on the other hand, deduce the truth of Minnie's existence, and unite to subvert the law and establish a new form of justice based on the caring and connectedness of women, not the abstract principles of men. Chapter five illustrates Alice Walker's utilization of the myth to expose the worldwide oppression of women. In The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, Celie and Tashi find meaning for their existence in a confederacy of women who bond to repudiate the tyranny of culture and redefine themselves as worthy and whole. Philomela raped, mutilated and silenced is a familiar image for women. The strength in an otherwise horrific tale lies in Philomela's ability to subvert the patriarchy that would subjugate her by usurping the power of language into a call to sisterhood and an affirmation of such power in that bond.

The dissertation investigates whether there is a place of refuge for women characters within and/or beyond American literary texts written by men around the turn of the twentieth century. Besides major and minor texts of leading American men of letters, Henry Adams and Henry James, the texts also include two Dutch novels, Multatuli's Max Havelaar and Frederik van Eeden's Van de koele meren des doods. In examining these texts, the dissertation seeks for a male feminist practice that does not immediately turn into a male practice of appropriation and violence, I adopt a feminist practice of exposing gender representations in canonical male-authored texts, giving particular attention to the results of their representations for women. The question I ask of them is also a question I ask of my critical practice: is a genuine representation of female characters by male authors possible? The metaphors of feminism as a "no man's land" and American literature as a "territorial battle" connect issues central in Adams, James, Multatuli, and Van Eeden. The inclusion of the Dutch texts "within" American literature takes place not only on the basis of intertextual links with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, but also because their preoccupation with gender resembles gender systems in texts of Henry Adams and Henry James. All these male authors share an interest in the representation of women in their literary works. Henry Adams argues in The Education that there is "no refuge" for modern American women except "such as the male created for himself." After analyzing the Dutch novels, James's The Wings of the Dove, and Adams's Esther, his South Seas letters, and The Education of Henry Adams, I locate these dubious moments of refuge for women within male representation in strategies of idealizations of female alterity, self-reflexivity, exposure of the cultural construction of gender, and silence. Whether these places of refuge for women within the borders of the male texts go beyond already staked out territories into "no man's land" is a question at the heart of the dissertation.

What is "the Book?" Theology and philosophy have traditionally postulated the metaphysical precedence of orality and considered literacy as a subsequent, historical turning point: one day, an original logos "came down" and "enclosed itself" inside the Book. The "community of the Book" has continued to read and write within the epistemological boundaries of this first inscription. Literature has increasingly disengaged the Book from this logocentric foundation. Modern writers have even postulated the philosophical priority of "being in the Book" (Jabes) and redefined logos as one phase of writing (Derrida). Simultaneously, they have attempted to describe the "outside" of the Book: not as logos or truth, but as the endless, meaningless murmur of words which Blanchot calls "rumeur." Rumor, not unlike logos, is yet another form of writing inscribing exteriority within the Book in a complex textual strategy which Nancy calls "excription." Writing may then be defined as the production of an oscillating limit ("&") between an inscribed livre and an "excribed" parole. Exergue: Rumeur. Blanchot's rumeur, Beckett's voix, Serres's noise, Bonnefoy's parole, as well as John's logos en arche are extreme cases of textual "excription." Introduction. Critical review of speech/writing theories. Chapter 1: Sacre/Le Livre & la Parole. In Exodus, Ezechiel, John, Koran, and Dogon myth, the divine Word "descends" into the Book, forming an ethical community. Chapter 2: Cycle/Le Livre & le Monde. The closed figure of the Book is projected onto the indefinite spaces of world (Dante, Koyre), mind (Rorty) and episteme (Foucault, Diderot, Hegel, Novalis). Chapter 3: Modernite/La Litterature & le Livre. Jewish Kabbalah (Isaac the Blind, Zohar) offers a grammatocentric counterpoint which has influenced modern definitions of "Book" (Mallarme, Jabes, Derrida). Logocentric metaphysics undergoes serious alterations as the figure of the Book "melts" into literature (Rabelais, Cyrano, Voltaire, Valery). Conclusion. What generates the fragile delineation between livre and parole is an insatiable desir de l'ecrire (Bourjea).

Through readings of a variety of literary and historical narratives from throughout the Americas dating from the 16th century to the present, I show that miscegenation, its sudden and disrupting revelation in these narratives serving as the catalyst for utopian and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, becomes a trope for New World cultural identity (Utopia and Apocalypse themselves being crucial ideas for this hemisphere). I call by the name "Astonishment" the resulting space created by the sudden revelation of miscegenation in these narratives.

The myth of the disobedient woman, along with patriarchal myths of virginity, provide writers with what appears to be a natural alliance between womanhood and fiction. This alliance, not natural but artificial, is between man and fiction using woman's virginally "empty" form as a metaphorical space in which the writer creates himself and his stories. In The Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury and The French Lieutenant's Woman male novelists use disobedient women to tell surface narratives which appear to be about their female heroes but which are actually about the needs, desires and fears of the male writers, narrators, characters. The story of the woman hero, when it exists, lies buried in the margins of the male stories, moving in secret contradiction below the surface reflection of the male story. The surface narrative of The Portrait is built on a series of misunderstandings of Isabel's ideas and intentions. She is judged based on these misunderstandings rather than on what she herself achieves. Similarly, Hardy's surface narrative obscures the fact that Tess is a fierce woman whose individuality leads to her end on the gallows. Daisy provides the perfectly silent, compliant form for tales told by Nick, Gatsby, and Fitzgerald. While Brett tells the story that Hemingway gives her to tell, she also maintains great individual power. Caddy is usually seen as the means to a fuller understanding of her brothers, or, more recently, as a blank mirror reflecting male desire. Though she is used in both these ways inside the novel she is also a character with a strong voice and a story that I believe Faulkner meant us to hear. Sarah, often viewed as a feminist, actually has no story nor voice. Fowles's story is of man's fear of woman s power to "make" man in her image. These authors write fantasies of control that they cannot maintain. Depending on the author, what emerges is either a strong woman who tells her own story or the secret story of the writer.

Despite the tremendous linguistic particularities and cultural differences, Chinese poetry shares some formal and technical similarity with Anglo-American poetry. Through an effective use of the couplet-based verse form well suited for the play of parallelism and antithesis, classic Chinese poets and Alexander Pope achieve precision and concision in emotional and intellectual communications, making extremely precise distinctions between the elements of their thoughts or feelings. In terms of the "aesthetic form," "the relation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the conditions of human perceptions," a certain type of Chinese Tang poetry and poetry by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams display affinity, as manifested in the employment of juxtaposition to project a subjective state through presentation of external objects.

This study proposes that Leila Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul, two widely-read contemporary novelists, intuitively understand Albert Camus' idea of revolt, using it to legitimate their non-essentialized, transcultural models of individual and collective identity. This dissertation views an Algerian teenager's rendezvous with Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul in Les Carnets de Sherazade as a magical portal through which Leila Sebbar allows us to see her fiction as a subversion and a reappropriation of the liberal philosophical principles underlying V. S. Naipaul's novels and travel journals. Although they interpret the increasing visibility of cultural, racial, and religious fundamentalisms in Western and non-Western societies as signs of a gathering nihilistic storm, neither Sebbar nor Naipaul believe that these epistemologically bounded ideologies of revolt are invincible. Instead, both depict rebellion, an epistemologically open-ended and altruistic form of revolt, as the exclusive means through which post-colonials across the globe can experience individual and communal wholeness---liberty, equality, fraternity, and peace---amidst the eponymous mixing of different peoples and truths in the late twentieth century. Chapter One explores the concepts of rebellion and nihilism in Albert Camus' The Rebel and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. It also investigates the uncanny philosophical and thematic parallels in Leila Sebbar's and V. S. Naipaul's works. Chapter Two analyzes the theme of the returned gaze in Sebbar's Sherazade and Le Fou de Sherazade. It shows how Sherazade, Sebbar's title character, resists Orientalism and Islamic orthodoxy in a rebellious manner. The Algerian teenager challenges the "master's" desire for supremacy without denying his or her dignity. Chapter Three investigates the relationship between Sebbar's fiction and Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil, her correspondence with Canadian author Nancy Huston. It demonstrates that Sebbar's formulation of exile as a hybrid, contingent identitarian space in Lettres parisiennes is coterminous with Camus' notion of rebellion. Chapter Four is a detailed study of Sherazade's encounter with V. S. Naipaul in southwestern France in Les Carnets de Sherazade. Using Anne Donadey's model of mimicry, it claims that Sebbar subverts the British-Caribbean writer's representations of the ex-colonized's subjectivity and revalidates his underlying faith in rebellion.

<p> <i>Reading Home from Exile: Narratives of Belonging in Western Literature </i> analyzes the way in which narratives of belonging arise from Western literary works that have been largely read as works of exile. This dissertation insists on the importance of the concept of home even in the light of much of the theoretical criticism produced in the last fifty years which turns to concepts that emphasize movement, rootlessness, homelessness, and difference. Through readings of Western literature spanning from canonical ancient Greek texts to Mexican novels of the revolution and to Chicano/a literature, this study shows that literature continues to dwell on the question of home and that much of the literature of exile is an attempt to narrate home. Beginning with a close reading of <i>Oedipus the King</i> and <i>Oedipus at Colonus,</i> the first chapter discusses Oedipus's various moments of exile and the different spheres of belonging (biological/familial, social, political) that emerge through a close reading of these moments of exile. Chapter 2 examines these same categories of belonging in Mauricio Magdaleno's <i> El resplandor,</i> an <i>indigenista</i> novel set in post-revolutionary Mexico about the trials and tribulations of the Otomi town of San Andres. Chapter 3 continues to consider literature that takes Revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico as setting and analyzes the narratives of belonging that arise in Juan Rulfo's <i>Pedro P&aacute;ramo</i> and Elena Garro's <i>Recollections of Things to Come.</i> Finally, Chapter 4 analyzes the emergence of these categories of home in Chicano/a literature and thought, focusing on Gloria Anzaldua's<i> Borderlands/La Frontera</i> and its relation to Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity and to postcolonial theory in general. </p>