Despite the recent increase in scholarship on the subject of the female experience in exile, there is still much to be done. Exile scholars now have at their disposal an abundance of broad, general overviews of the circumstances and fates of displaced women writers, but a dearth of scholarship that considers specific literary works in an individualised fashion still exists. This is especially true of those female writers who have only recently been 'rediscovered', such as the three under discussion in this thesis. This thesis explores in detail the exile writings of Veza Canetti, Anna Gmeyner, and Lili Korber, about which little scholarship exists, and uses them as case studies to illuminate the situation of exiled women writers in general The exile works of these three authors repay study both for their own literary merits and for what they can tell us about the individual experience of exile. In their broad similarities, these writers also provide us with case studies of the larger experience of authorial exile - particularly, but by no means exclusively, the gendered experience - that allow us to derive more general lessons about the influence of forced flight on literary art. By giving due consideration to work produced in exile, this thesis calls into question some of the generalisations commonly found in recent scholarship and demonstrates that, despite hardsrnps and setbacks and contrary to common scholarly contention, all three women continued to write well into their exile years and that in those years they took their writing in new, skilful, and creative directions.

Can we consider Plutarch's Parallel Lives a historical work? Can we read them as a unitary series? These are the initial questions that this thesis poses and that are investigated in the Introduction, five main Chapters, and the Conclusion. In the Introduction, a preliminary status quaestionis about ancient biography is presented before clarifying the methodology adopted for reading the Parallel Lives as a unitary historical work and the reasons for choosing the Lives of Lycurgus, Lysander, and Agesilaus as the case studies to examine in detail. Chapter 1 discusses the historiographical principles that emerge from the De sera numinis vindicta: for Plutarch history is primarily the history of individuals and cities, based on the interpretation of historical events. Chapter 2 tries to verify the hypothesis that the Parallel Lives correspond to the historical project delineated in the De sera numinis vindicta. This Chapter, moreover, reassesses the literary form of the Parallel Lives by employing the concepts of 'open macrotext' and 'cross-complementarity' between the Lives. Chapter 3 analyses the Life of Lycurgus, focusing on the formation of the cultural identity and the political model of Sparta. In the Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch indicates already the intrinsic weaknesses of Sparta and the probable causes of Spartan decline in the fourth century BC. Chapter 4 is devoted to the Life of Lysander, where Plutarch narrates how after the Peloponnesian War Sparta established its hegemony over the Greeks and, simultaneously, began its rapid moral and political decline into decadence. Plutarch also seems to suggest that in this historical period of extraordinary changes not only Sparta and Lysander but all the Greeks were guilty of distorting moral values. Chapter 5 concentrates on Agesilaus, who could have led Sparta and the Greeks to great success against the Persians, but, instead, had to save Sparta from complete destruction after the Battle of Leuctra. The Conclusion recapitulates the main points of the thesis and proposes possible arguments for future research on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

‘Poetry’ insisted Ezra Pound, ‘is a composition of words set to music’: his Cantos remembered ‘Uncle Willie’ downstairs composing, singing poetry to himself. This study examines the nature and effects of W.B.Yeats’s idiosyncratic but profound sense of music. For his poems were compositions set to music. They were saturated with musical themes; syntactically he professed to write for the ear rather than the eye; and he flung himself repeatedly into the breach between music and words, composing ballads, songs, and plays with music, and performing poetry with musical instruments. My thesis is that nature of poetry, spoken, read or sung, obsessed Yeats, and I hold it self evident that such an acutely self-conscious poetry will articulate this obsession: to use his own imagery, will bear the scars of its own birth. What follows is a study of meaning, obsession, and influence, beginning with what Yeats knew and how he came to poetry: his father’s and his own vocalizations of the musical preoccupations of Scott and Shelley, viewed through the annotations of ‘the first book [he] knew Shelley in’ and the solipsistic singers and instrumentalists of his early verse. The theme of chapter two is Ireland: the musical resonances of Anglo Irish ballads and Irish verse are viewed through Yeats’s aurally-oriented canon-formation, as we examine his instinctual recitations and deliberate approach to Irish folksong through the mediation of Douglas Hyde. The aesthetics of Wagner, Pater, and the French symbolistes frame the third chapter, which describes how poetry might approach the condition of music in the motivic organization of The Wind Among the Reeds. In chapter four the impact of Nietzsche’s profoundly musical philosophy is correlated for the first time with the exact moments of Yeats’s discovery of his texts, as Yeats’s plays and poetry move from ‘Apollonian’ languor to ‘Dionysian’ energy, from dream to song and dance. My final chapter uncovers the long history of the practical experiments Yeats made to perform poetry with a ‘psaltery’, and their resonating afterlife in subsequent poetry and poets. No musician himself, Yeats’s musical sense has until now been entirely dismissed: this study shows how central it is to his art and to an understanding of the dominant aesthetic of the age.

This thesis examines accounts of electricity in journalism, short stories, novels, poetry and instructional writings, composed between 1830 and 1880 by scientific investigators, popular practitioners and fiction authors. The writings are approached as diverse and often incongruous impressions of electricity, in which the use of figurative and narrative techniques brings into question distinctions between science and literature. It is proposed that the unusual combination of electricity’s historical characterisation as an elixir vitae, intense investigation by contemporary scientists, and close alliance with new technologies offered unique opportunities for imaginative speculation. The thesis contends that engaging with these conflicting characteristics created a synthesis of scientific, social and literary responses that defy epistemological and generic categorisation. Fictionality is approached in chapter two as a central feature of scientific conceptualisation, experiment and discovery, particularly in the work of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. In chapters three and four, the landscape of popular non-fiction books and periodicals is mapped, to show the ways in which the period’s publication contexts and forums, reading patterns, and use of literary practices contributed to wider engagement with ideas about electricity. Chapters five and six focus on fiction writings, identifying parallels and divergences between actual electrical science and its fictional portrayal. Short stories are shown to have emphasised associations between electricity, neurosis, deformity and the occult, complicating contemporary scientific optimism and presenting electricity as an alluring yet dangerous phenomenon, which disordered the natural world and man’s relationship with it. These characteristics are identified further in the metaphorical references of several canonical novelists, in the exploitation of electricity, elixirs and power depicted by William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and through a case study of the text and reception of a popular novel about electricity by Benjamin Lumley. The thesis contends that electricity’s anomalous and protean nature produced distinctively hybrid responses that enhance our understanding of contemporary popular writing, its contexts and how it was read.

ZBIEJCZUKOVÁ, I. The conception of hero in fantasy literature. Diploma thesis. Prague: ÚČLLV FF UK, 2010-2011. This diploma thesis deals with typology of heroes and heroins in fantasy literature, with special regard to heroic quest from the point of view of literally composition. One part of the thesis applies to the defition and history of fantasy genre in both anglo-saxon and czech environment. The thesis therefore uses and cites both czech and foreign fantasy literally works. The aim of the thesis is to point to archetypical neomythic structure of fantasy texts and to their tendency to recreate heroism using particular examples of fantasy literature.

M.A. / This study approaches a special area of comparative literature in English which has not been researched in any great detail to date. Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, first published in 1883, had an Australian counterpart in Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, first published in 1901. Both novels stemmed from a deep-rooted discontent with Colonial society and, specifically, with the status of women in that society. Both these novelists were early Colonial writers whose works proved to be watersheds in the development of the literary output of their respective countries. Both novelists have a similar status in their respective literature, and their novels show many comparable attributes ...

Orientador: Sônia Helena de O. Raymundo Piteri / Banca: Lilian Jacoto / Banca: Márcio Scheel / Resumo: Esta dissertação busca realizar uma leitura dos textos Avalovara (1973), de Osman Lins, e O jogo da liberdade da alma (2003), de Maria Gabriela Llansol, tomando como ponto de partida procedimentos metaficcionais que aí se manifestam, com ênfase em apontamentos autoconscientes e autorreflexivos que possibilitam observar de que maneira cada um dos autores direciona o seu texto. Nesse sentido, focalizar-se-á a forma de composição das duas obras, realçando um espaço de escrita no qual personagens, no romance de Lins, e figuras, no texto de Llansol, se encontram, gerando um movimento que se expande em termos de linguagem, linguagem dinâmica que se desdobra em múltiplos caminhos, enveredando por frestas que levam o leitor a redimensionar sua perspectiva de visão sobre a própria literatura / Abstract: This dissertation aims to read Avalovara (1973), by Osman Lins, and O jogo da liberdade da alma (2003), by Maria Gabriela Llansol, considering as a starting point the metafictional procedures which manifest in the two texts, with an emphasis on self-conscious and self-reflective notes that allow us to observe how each author guides his text. Therefore, the literary construction of both works will be focused since it highlights a writing space in which characters in Lins's novel and figures in Llansol's text find themselves in this space, creating a movement that expands in terms of language, a dynamic language that opens out to multiple paths and directs its steps to gaps that lead the reader to rethink his perspective on literature itself / Mestre

Orientador: Cláudia Maria Ceneviva Nigro / Banca: Anselmo Peres Alós / Banca: Cleide Antonia Rapucci / Banca: Flávia Andrea Rodrigues Benfatti / Banca: Giséle Manganelli Fernandes / Resumo: A contemporaneidade tem colaborado com as mudanças na forma como as questões de gênero e sexualidade são vistas na sociedade. Padrões tradicionais vêm sendo quebrados e algumas formas de preconceito não se encaixam mais na comunidade. Hoje, muitos homens e mulheres não têm mais uma identidade única e fixa, e não configuram um par dual, e essa fragmentação das identidades de gênero possibilita a criação de ouras nomenclaturas. Com base nesse contexto de mudanças, as personagens de nosso corpus formam-se mulheres, homens, gays, lésbicas, e a construção do gênero é vista, então, como estratégia narrativa, na qual as escritoras procuram mostrar que há possibilidades para formação de gênero distinta dos padrões impostos pela matriz heteronormativa. Assim, realizamos uma análise de como essas configurações de gênero, masculinos ou femininos, são representadas na literatura, partindo da premissa de que as identidades de gênero sofrem rupturas com os modelos tradicionais e estão deslocadas, devido às diversas orientações sexuais presentes na contemporaneidade. Como corpus deste trabalho, escolhemos cinco obras, de escritoras norte-americanas, brasileiras e inglesas, a partir da década de 1970, a saber: Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), de Rita Mae Brown; The Front Runner (1974), de Patricia Nell Warren; Hotel Dulac (1984), de Anita Brookner; Duas iguais (1996), de Cíntia Moscovich e Sapato de salto (2006), de Lygia Bojunga. A configuração da identidade de gênero das personagens é analisada... / Abstract: Contemporaneity has contributed to changes in the way gender and sexuality issues are seen in society. Traditional patterns have been broken and some forms of prejudice do not fit into current society anymore. Today, some men and women have no longer a single, fixed identity, and no longer form a dual pair, and this fragmentation of gender identities makes it possible to create nomenclatures. Based on this context of change, the characters of our corpus are women, men, gays, lesbians, and the construction of gender is seen, therefore, as a narrative strategy, in which women writers try to show that there are possibilities for gender formation which differs from the patterns imposed by the heteronormative matrix. Thus, we perform an analysis of how these configurations of gender, male or female, are represented in literature, starting from a premise that gender identities suffer ruptures from traditional models and are displaced, due to diverse sexual orientations present in contemporary times. As a corpus of this work, we chose five works by American, Brazilian and English writers, beginning in the 1970s: Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown; The Front Runner (1974), by Patricia Nell Warren; Hotel Dulac (1984), by Anita Brookner; Duas iguais (1996), by Cíntia Moscovich and Sapato de salto (2006), by Lygia Bojunga. The configuration of the characters gender identity is analyzed in the light of Judith Butler's theory of performativity (1993, 2003, 2004, 2015), according ... / Doutor

This thesis represents a study of Kate Chopin's groundbreaking novel, The Awakening. Further, it applies Nietzsche's principles of Dionysiac and Apollonian impulses to the literary analysis of the novel. I argue that the protagonist of the novel, Edna Pontellier, embarks on a quest to determine how she may live an authentic life - that is, a life whereby she is true to herself above all others. Ultimately, her search for self is overwhelmed by the imbalance of the Apollonian and Dionysiac impulses against which she struggles. Because Edna cannot successfully mediate this struggle, she reaches the conclusion that she may only attain a truth to her self if she finds that truth in death. / by Jessica Salamin. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Este trabalho consiste num estudo sobre o romance Macunaíma, de Mário de Andrade. Ele procura investigar o estilo enumerativo da obra. A intenção é relacionar tal procedimento, que toma sobretudo objetos da natureza brasileira, ao atraso material e cultural e à tentativa de preencher tal lacuna. Busca-se ainda interpretar as constantes metamorfoses ontológicas como um desdobramento desse estilo e do sentido a que ele dá forma. / This work is a study on Mário de Andrade\'s novel Macunaima. It focuses on numerative style wide used by the author, among others on the same period. The intent is relating such procedure, which involves above all objects from Brazilian nature, to the material and cultural backwardness and to a trial on fulfilling such lack. It seeks also to analyze the frequent ontological metamorphoses as a development of that style and of the meaning that it conceives.