This study focuses on a rather neglected, although significant, part of Robert Charbonneau's (1911-1967) works: his criticism. Founder, with some friends from college, of la Releve (1934) and les editions de l'Arbre (1940), well-known novelist Charbonneau creates a critical work closely linked to that publishing and intellectual experience. Thus, literature, according to Charbonneau, is an economic phenomenon. But literature also fits in a world where the human is the dominant feature, where it is a preferred way to shed light on the human mystery. Influenced by Maritain and Mounier, admirer of Dostoevski and Mauriac, Charbonneau, with his Catholic viewpoint, conflicts with traditional French-Canadian nationalism because of the opening onto the world and the search for universality he proposes. The novel appears as the human expression's ideal form. Charbonneau finally wishes that French-Canadian literature be alive, human, and universal, and that its American meaning be understood. National is, in his opinion, unessential since a literary work is necessarily produced somewhere and, above all, intended to be literary in the first place.

Transcendence and transformation have been established as key motifs in apocalypses. The transformation of a seer during a heavenly journey is found commonly in such esoteric apocalypses as I Enoch. No heavenly journey occurs in the works treated here. Rather, symbolic women figures--"ladies" in the classical sense--who are associated with God's City or tower, undergo transformation at key points in the action. The surface structures of Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and The Shepherd of Hermas are traced, and the crucial transformation episode or episodes are located within each structure. Transformation of figures representing God's people suggests the significance of identity within the apocalyptic perspective. Apocalypses allow the world to be viewed from the future or from the heavens (J. J. Collins' "temporal" and "spatial" axes); the genre also invites the reader to change identity (the "identical" axis), and so become someone in tune with divine mystery and revelation.

This study offers additional nuance to the garden topos and trope within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian women's writing and extends the critical discussion of landscape and the garden as archetype in Canadian literature. This dissertation cross-fertilizes literary analysis with garden theory, using the work of such garden historians as John Dixon Hunt, Mark Francis, and Randolph Hester. The argument emphasizes that gardens in literature, like their actual counterparts, are an art of milieu, reflective of their socio-physical contexts. Both real and textual gardens are rhetorical: their content and formal features invite interpretation. A textual garden performs similarly to an actual garden by providing a spatial frame; a means of naturalization; a vivid exemplar of growth, fertility and beauty; a mediation of the artificial and the natural; a space of paradox; and a site of social performance. / The specific focus of this study is "domestic gardens": gardens that are intimate, immediate to the home, and part of daily life. Chapter one separates the garden from archetypal models by studying the garden as an actual place (specifically, the backwoods kitchen garden) described in the works of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Chapter two examines how the garden influences Moodie's and Traill's writing of the "transplanted" female emigrant. Chapter three presents the bower as an important precursor to the domestic garden through Gabrielle Roy's Enchantment and Sorrow (1984) and "Garden in the Wind" (1975). Through the bower, Roy mediates the female artist's ambivalence toward home in her pursuit of independence. Chapter four explores Carol Shields' sanctification of the domestic in her fiction through the concept of paradise as both an ideal setting and a mode of being. Chapter five provides a "garden tour" of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, culminating in the garden as a model for the text itself and for the genre of palimpsest. For these writers, literal and figurative gardens are ways of "planting" their characters and personae, "plotting" their narratives, mediating social conventions, and providing an interpretative lens through which readers may perceive the texts as a whole.

The primary objective of this M. A. thesis is to correct some false assumptions found in both older and more recent secondary literature on North American Indian narratives. Many folklorists base their folktale criteria on terms of cultural differences instead of similarities which results in an ethnocentric point of view that holds the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen as a standard against which all other folktale collections falls short. If we want to strive for a world view that will embrace all types of literature, while respecting the individuality of each culture, then we must focus on the essential similarities among world literatures and not the differences. The purpose of using another culture as a comparison, such as that of the North American Indians, is to question the ethnocentric definitions of folktales and fairy tales which have often been too rigid. Perhaps those cultural values exhibited by North American Indian folktales could prove to be beneficial to the world's multi-cultural society, in that these values could enrich and rejuvenate some Western values, such as respect for animals and the environment. These values may offer solutions to urgent contemporary world problems. Through a comparative analysis of the animal suitor motif found in the Grimms' fairy tales and North American Indian folktales, I hope to call attention to the stark cross-cultural similarities in universal folklore and to bring to light the multiplicity of cultural values which are deeply rooted in fairy tales and folklores around the world.

In what follows I examine problems surrounding Barbara Herrnstein Smith's relativist conception of value in her book Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. I begin by showing how her conception of value is comprised of two distinct philosophical claims: the first axiological and the second epistemological. She first presents an anti-objectivist argument for axiological relativism which is quite tenable. She then tries to gain further support for this position by putting forth a version of epistemological relativism, a move which not only fails, but if true would undermine even her relativist axiology. Once I have shown her constructivist position to be misleading, if not incoherent, I then reconsider what her axiological position would look like if it had the support of a more tenable epistemology. I therefore offer a conception of value, borrowed from Paul Grice's The Conception of Value and Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, which argues from a realist epistemology yet accepts a significant degree of axiological relativism.

This work attempts to trace back the models for the various Berenice stories in French literature. Two different trends seem to emerge. The first one is related to the unhappy relationship between Titus and Berenice, the Judaic queen of the first century A.D. The other goes back to the events of the Ptolemaic period when a series of queens also bear the name of Berenice. Present day literature tends thus to show a return to the facts that originally gave birth to the myth.

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The end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth saw many women writers from numerous social ranks, political affiliations and religious denominations reading, writing, circulating and publishing polemical prose and poetry in defence of their sex. During this surge of protofeminist activity, many of these women decried 'Customs Tyranny' by advocating a more egalitarian status for themselves, especially in regard to marriage, education and religion. This thesis, then, is a socio-historic study of the lives and writings of several polemical women writers, namely, Mary Astell (1666-1731), Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) and Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731). It also considers how and why protofeminism evolved in the late seventeenth century and reached a climax between 1694, when Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and 1710, when Chudleigh published Essays upon Several Subjects. Until now, scholars of early women writers have labelled Astell the foremost English feminist of her day. Consequently, many of her contemporary protofeminist writers have been neglected. By contextualizing their lives and texts within the political and literary activity at the turn of the eighteenth century, this thesis ultimately argues that women polemicists, such as Chudleigh and Thomas, who followed Astell into print, were not merely echoes and disciples. Rather, they furthered the evolution and secularization of a genre that anticipates feminism proper, which began to develop in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to uncover and rediscover the personal and professional details of these women's lives their class, education, friendships and patronage relationships this thesis relied heavily upon material evidence such as letters, parish records, legal records, prison records and wills. As a result, it combines feminist, materialist inclinations with traditional methodology, such as historical and archival research.

In the Islamic tradition, as in other religious traditions, female saints are relatively few and not much scholarly attention has been given to them. Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, is one such example. It is, however, a point of interest in her case is that in the twentieth century she has captured the attention of writers of Muslim religious literature to such an extent that there now exist at least eleven fairly recent biographies of her in Urdu, English, Arabic and Persian. This is remarkable, given that the earliest sources of Islamic history contain only a minimal amount of information on her. These modern biographies present Fatimah in a manner which interweaves historical information with hagiographic accounts, thus reinforcing her status as a saint. / This thesis attempts to identify, from the earliest available sources, the details concerning Fatimah as a historical person but ultimately shows that there is little real evidence for her life and even what facts do exist are the subject of controversy. Following this it examines the growth of the hagiographical tradition which created out of her a true Muslim saint and discusses its significance particularly for the Shi'ah. Finally, the conclusion presents some of the possible reasons for Fatimah's exalted status and for the resurgence of interest in her in the context of the modern Islamic world.

This study explores the literary representations of the post-colonial margin, and develops this site as a place of possibility to transform self identity and acquire power. This exploration of Caribbean-Canadian literature, from writers born in the Caribbean who emigrated to Canada indicates the potential for power in the margins without idealizing this space. / Close readings of fiction by Neil Bissoondath, Dionne Brand and Marlene Nourbese Philip illustrate various struggles within the margin based on race, gender, economics, and education. Despite vast ideological differences regarding identity, all three authors concur in their characterizations of the margin. In each work, the margin is not a monolithic entity, but rather a diverse space which allows for the constitution of various identities. / This textual analysis in conjunction with critical analysis also addresses issues of language appropriation and cultural ghettoization, by critiquing the right of one group to speak for another in a racially mixed society such as Canada, as well as by critiquing the homogeneity of identity within one racial group. Ultimately, by illuminating these textual and critical trends, this study looks toward possible future directions for Caribbean-Canadian literature.