The present thesis offers a comparative analysis of the theme of feminine doubling, which has not yet been taken into academic consideration. It examines the strategies of construction of relationships bonding mother-figures, daughter-figures, and father-figures in the various texts selected for inclusion in this dissertation from British and Polish literature. The key argument is that the tie between feminine doubles can be positive. A mother-figure (or the first wife) is capable of sharing her experiences with her daughter-figure (or the second wife). The second pivot of this exploration is the figure of a sexual mother. The dissertation comprises three parts. The aim of the first section of the thesis is to provide an introduction to the broad cultural context of the mid-nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Polish literature. The second, pivotal part is an exploration of the themes of feminine doubling and feminine sexuality as manifested in the Polish texts, including Narcyza Żmichowska’s The Heathen, Maria Konopnicka’s “Miss Florentine”, Maria Komornicka’s “On Father and his Daughter” and Zofia Nałkowska’s “Green Shore”. It also consists of an interrogation of the shifts occurring in the plot of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: these shifts concern the protagonists and the nature of their relationships with the sexual mother-figures. The present analysis stems from the conviction that a comparative reinterpretation of the two novels has been largely overlooked so far. The aim of the thesis is to apply various theoretical approaches that enable the reader to bring together the Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and écriture féminine. The broad psychoanalytical context, including the works of the forgotten Freudian scholar Sabina Spielrein, provides a basis for the comparison. It also enables a profound, intertextual, and inspiring analysis. The thesis is meant to provide a much-needed new reading of Polish women's literature in a comparative structure, so that these texts may be afforded their appropriate position within the British and Polish critique. The innovative features of the research include its comparative character, and the implementation of various psychoanalytical approaches to the Polish works. Additionally, the thesis focuses on literary analysis. It incorporates the findings of various scholars interested in issues associated with “femininity”: it emphasises the importance of gender and feminist issues to the literary (re)interpretation of women’s texts. The present investigation is not conclusive and should be viewed as a stepping stone for further comparative exploration of Polish novels penned by women.

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This thesis examines the literary uses of biblical typology in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It aims to show how late Victorian writers, having opted out of the orthodox Christian beliefs of the age, were still writing from within a cultural discourse shaped by, and based upon, such faith. Covering works as diverse as Sartor Resartus, De Profundis, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, and discussing writers who range from Mary Augusta Ward via Hardy to Strindberg and Dostoevsky, my contention is that these writers not only used the structure, terminology, and imagery of biblical typology to express their religious doubts, but that they 'reclaimed' what was strictly seen as a mode of exegesis and transformed it into a richly suggestive signifying system. Through this reconstructed mode of expression, they could offer to their readers ideas of a new 'religion' or, at least, a possible way out of the despair caused by the ultimate failure of Christian faith. The thesis is presented in three parts, the first of which briefly details the various available definitions of biblical typology itself. Following this, each sub-section of Part One traces a different aspect of late Victorian typology usage. Parts Two and Three deal with what I claim to be the two major strains of the late nineteenth century's secular use of typology - those concerned, respectively, with the 'imitation of' or 'association with' biblical types in their relation to literary characters. The changes made to the traditional biblical typology by late Victorian writers, as examined in this thesis, brought the biblical anti-type closer to the Jungian archetype, just as it brought the Nineteenth Century closer to our twentieth-century view of our religious and textual inheritance.

This thesis demonstrates how a specific tradition of English poetry written by Indians in the nineteenth-century borrowed its subject matter from Orientalist research into Indian antiquity, and its style and forms from the English poetic tradition. After an examination of the political, historical and social motivations that resulted in the birth of colonial poetry in India, the poets dealt with comprise Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31), the first Indian poet writing in English ; Kasiprasad Ghosh (1809-73), the first Bengali Hindu to write English verse; and Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73), who converted to Christianity in the hope of reaching England and becoming a great 'English' poet. A subsequent chapter examines the Dutt Family Album (London, 1870) in the changing political context of the latter half of the century. In the Conclusion it is shown how the advent of Modernism in England, and the birth of an active nationalism in India, finally brought about the end of all aspects of what is here called 'Orientalist' verse. This area has not been dealt with comprehensively by critics; only one book, Lotika Basu's Indian Writers of English Verse (1933), exists on this subject to date. This thesis, besides filling the gaps that exist in the knowledge available in this area, also brings an additional insight to bear on the current debate on colonialism and literature. After Said's Orientalism (1978), a spate of theoretical work has been published on literary studies and colonial power in British India. Without restricting the argument to the constraints of the Saidian model, this study addresses the issues raised by these works, showing that a subtler reading is possible, through the medium of this poetry, of the interaction that took place in India between the production of literature and colonialism. In particular, this thesis demonstrates that although Orientalist poetry was in many ways derivative, it also evinces an active and developing response to the imposition of British culture upon India.

This thesis analyses Anglo-Saxon conceptions of craftsmanship, and provides new interpretations for the notions of searo, orþonc and cræft in Old English literature. I argue that the texts discussing craftsmanship and craftsmen subscribe to an atemporal myth. This myth is not so much that of Weland the smith of Germanic lore, but rather a myth of the inculpating and redemptive power of craftsmanship, after a fall-and-salvation pattern. I show that, on the level of semantics, mirroring the above pattern, there are concurrent shifts in the meanings of two of the main terms for craftsmanship, and that notably searo is subject to pejoration in the process of transition from a poetic to a prose term, while cræft, on the other hand, witnesses a number of semantic changes to make it a versatile and uniquely positive expression of craftsmanship. Whereas orþanc is a neutral notion of craftsmanship that is bound to a concrete genre before being recast in the close environment of bishop Æthelwold‟s circle at Winchester in the tenth century, the semantic shifts in searo and cræft are testimony to broad cultural shifts in the representations of craftsmanship and in perceptions of the craftsman. The point of departure in Chapter One is with the artisans themselves, the craftsmen and skilled metalworkers – the actual makers of em>searo, orþonc and cræft. Taking the smith as the archetypal craftsman, I examine the manner in which this artisan-artist is depicted in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. I argue that two strands can be distinguished, one depicting the craftsman as reprobate, and another exalting him. In subsequent chapters, semantic studies and new readings of three notions of craftsmanship illuminate the intricate ways in which these two strands interact across time, genre and medium of expression. In Chapter Two, searo is examined within the semantic field of binding to show that it represents a traditional expression of superlative craftsmanship associated primarily with the smith, and denoting status and quality in verse. In its pejoration as a notion of scheming and deceit, it retains its strong association with binding and becomes a mechanism for redemption by connecting with the Harrowing of Hell tradition. Chapter Three shows how orþanc evolves from a poetic term denoting ancient craftsmanship into an abstract notion of ingenuity, by charting its existence in the gloss corpus and relating it to the glossing of mechanica in later Anglo-Saxon England. It emerges as a hermeneutic term characterised by moral neutrality, with close connections to the Benedictine Reform movement. Chapter Four is the first segment of a two-part examination of cræft as a notion of craftsmanship. After evaluating the body of existing critical material, I assess our understanding of the term's polysemy before analysing its use as a concrete but somewhat antiquated notion of magical craftsmanship. Chapter Five provides an in-depth assessment of an alternative, much more widespread, Christianized usage of cræft as a notion of divine endowment. It shows how this notion is instrumental in several highly positive assessments of smiths analysed in Chapter One, and argues that it provides a platform for other craftsmen to distinguish themselves in a religious, orthodox way. In my conclusion, I show that the new readings of these notions are key to interpreting metaphors of poetic creation and creativity as used by authors such as Cynewulf.

Following the path of the use of the Petrarchan sonnet in Renaissance England, this article explores why this specific form was so prevalent from the court of Henry VIII to that of his daughter, Elizabeth I. The article pays specific attention to the works of Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, paying close attention to social, political, and gender issues of the period.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art. / This study demonstrates the relationship between nationalism and identity formation by exploring the ways in which Zimbabwean writers have constructed identities within the context of a nationalist struggle for independence. By focusing on the predominant themes of disease, alienation and disintegration, it explores how these identities emphasise difference and heterogeneity in response to the homogenising discourses of colonialism and nationalism. The disparity between the ways in which nationalism articulates itself and is apprehended, and the ways in which nationalism allows for the foregrounding of particular identities is illustrated by reference to the idea of a pact or alliance - an agreement reached on the basis of the necessity of defeating colonialism. WhiIe motivations are often disparate, this common goal allows for a show of unity, often mistaken as homogeneity. The achievement of independence entails a shift in priorities, where those differing identities that previously seemed homogenous, come to the fore precisely to emphasise their difference. / Andrew Chakane 2019

A research report submitted in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Masters in African Literature of Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, April 2017 / This research report uses the “Frozen Image” - a widely circulated photograph taken by the British South Africa Company of Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi, the female and male Shona Mhondoros who led Zimbabwe’s first anti-colonial uprising against the settlers, as its point of departure to explore the relationship between settler-colonial, nationalist, patriarchal and feminist versions of Mbuya Nehanda’s role and agency in the First Chimurenga. This paper begins by demonstrating that it is necessary for nationalist discourses to seek to “lock in” the histories embodied in visual moments such as the widely and historically circulated “Frozen Image”, arguing that they are reliant on the “fixedness” of gendered national temporalities. I argue that Charles Samupindi’s Death Throes: The Trial Against Mbuya Nehanda demonstrates that when the challenge to settler-colonial projections of an African past go unaccompanied by an interrogation of historical gender relations and a broader challenge to Western modernities, it is necessary to remain faithful to, and narrate the Frozen Image, in a self-conscious, realist, imaginatively constrained narrative project. This is whereas Yvonne Vera’s, Nehanda demonstrates that it is possible to “move beyond the image” to create a liberatory, poetic and imaginative narrative project. / XL2018

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing, 2013 / Towards the end of the very last chapter, I visited Yitzhak in his room behind the shop in Hunter Street, Yeoville. He was shrouded in the smell of Old Man farts, listening to the sound of the labouring Dora Lipschitz, painfully nurdling down the pavement supported by her aluminium walking frame. [No abstract provided. Information taken from the first page]. / XL2018

This dissertation explores how the plot pattern intensifies the tragicomic effect by provoking the audience's creative response to the four absurdist plays: Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs (1950), Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1957), and Edward Albee's The American Dream (1961). / The plot pattern of absurdist plays is characterized by contradictory and disjointed elements in the characters' verbal or non-verbal actions. This plot pattern engages the audience's detached, intellectual response to the characters' situation, in which a comic sense of deviation from normal human behavior and a tragic sense of disjointedness from meaningful human life combine to produce a tragicomic effect on the audience. When the four absurdist plays listed above present characters who are outsiders, the plot pattern intensifies the tragicomic effect because the outsiders negate the audience's expectations, activate its intellectual responses to, and deepen its tragicomic perceptions of the disjointed stage situation. / Chapter One begins with a brief explanation of essential elements of tragedy and comedy and shows how earlier tragicomedies combine the elements of the opposite dramatic genres. This exposition will help to clarify how the absurdist plot pattern distinctively combines tragic and comic elements through disjointed devices, uses outsiders to intensify the tragicomic effect produced by these devices, and invites the audience's intellectual catharsis by provoking its probable resolution of the play's unresolved ending. / In the later chapters, this dissertation analyzes each of the four absurdist plays, focusing on how the distinctive plot pattern guides the audience's creative participation in giving tragicomic significance to the play. In doing so, this dissertation unfolds each analysis within the general framework of Wolfgang Iser's response theory which is useful for the systematic development of the analysis. According to Iser, the audience, through hermeneutic responses of expectation, frustration, retrospection, and reconstruction, fills in the indeterminate elements of the character's inconsequential behaviors and considers the unstated meaning of the play. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-04, Section: A, page: 1240. / Major Professor: Karen L. Laughlin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.