This survey of twentieth and twenty-first century novels, guidebooks, magazines, and the social media platform Instagram illustrates the discursive paradigm by which Western backpacking tourists encounter the formerly colonized world. The "postcolonial playground" avails the non-Western world as a theatre for recreation and meaning-making, an engagement which renders locals as accessories to an experience, perpetuating colonial-era power dialectics that continue to privilege the Western subject over the individuals in whose homes they travel. Ideologically and in praxis, the postcolonial playground has become the naturalized disposition of Western tourists seeking their next holiday. In so many words, the formerly colonized world has been recolonized by tourists, who are oblivious to the regime of privilege that extorts locals in popular tourist destinations.

Includes bibliography. / White South African author Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and African American author Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930) are well-known and celebrated literary figures in their own right, but are seldom read side by side. Furthermore, these authors and their works are traditionally placed on different spectrums of feminist literary genealogies despite writing during a similar time-frame and sharing converging feminist agendas. This thesis analyses The Story of an African Farm (1883), Schreiner’s first completed novel, alongside Hopkins’ first full-length novel, the romance Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Individually, these novels and their authors do radical work in liberating their female characters from the patriarchal and racial oppression prevalent in each context. This thesis argues that reading the two in tandem offers unique insight into a specifically transnational and transracial feminist consciousness emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century. Identifying multiple links between the novels’ feminist concerns and their intersecting negotiations with race and empire, this comparative literary study establishes temporal, spatial and conceptual links between the two works, arguing that these links transcend both the space and race of their novels’ local contexts in order to suggest a definitive transnational and transracial feminist awareness. Such a reading moreover disrupts traditional genealogies of western feminism, urging scholars to look beyond the narrow scope of feminist “waves” and schools in order to detect nuances, convergences and relationships between texts which such genealogies disregard.

By investigating three texts, namely Chrétien de Troyes' Erec and Enide, Geoffrey Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale", and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I seek to demonstrate how clothing, honour, gender and gifts shape the experiences of the characters as they find their social place, and disrupt the body as a category on which to base nobility. Although my texts emerge from different social and historical circumstances, the clothing they depict represents similar social transactions of class, gender and honour in the courtly space: ladies are made suitable for marriage through dresses, and a knight is forced to come to terms with the fallibility of his honour through his armour and a girdle. Vital to my investigation is the category of the body, on which Medieval theories of class and virtue were based. Clothing that is frequently used as a constituting symbol of acceptable bodies proves fallible; Enide and Griselda take up royal robes and positions unsuited to their humble origins, and Gawain cannot maintain his honourable manhood when faced with the lure of the life-saving girdle. The characters' divergence from the norms of symbolic representation through clothing alienates the performance of honour from the body, thereby destabilizing bodily superiority (nobility) as a basis for social elevation. Enide and Griselda change their clothing and their social position, but neither woman's translation alters their core characteristics of virtue and goodness. Clothing is physically removable from the body, which poses a challenge for a society so invested in its representative and symbolic power. My investment in clothing as it relates to 'correct' social performance relies on the disjuncture between the characters' natural embodiment of honour and the clothing they receive as gifts. The obligatory reciprocation of gifts takes on the nature of economic transactions, linking clothing to gendered expectations of honour and virtue. Throughout these texts, changeable clothing, whether received as a gift, put on or taken off, demonstrates the heightened attention paid to the rapidly-changing social structure of commercialising society in the high- to late-Medieval era. Removable and improvable, clothing disrupted concepts of class and gender, allowing for greater social freedom in the courtly space.

The 'new' nationalisms that have developed in postcolonial Jamaica and South Africa invite the reclamation of the slave mother, while simultaneously 'cleansing' her body of slavery's atrocities for the purpose of national healing. Michelle Cliff's Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, and Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Playing in the Light, reveal this national practice of elision, and especially how the disremembering of slavery factors into personal identity formation. A deeper glance into this process exposes the lingering white supremacist, patriarchal symbolic at the centre of these nations, which maintains its centrality through the erasure of the slave mother and the disavowal of rape - two things which inevitably obscure the intersection of race and sex. The colonial residue of shame and trauma, left uninterrogated in the national script, imprints itself on women of colour and affects our legibility in society today. This dissertation evaluates the exclusion of slavery and the slave mother from the national script, and highlights this exclusion in postcolonial literature to reveal its impact on an intimate level. In my analysis, I interrogate the Lacanian symbolic to showcase the white male universality it employs, which alongside the intersecting discourses of race and sex, render women of colour illegible. Furthermore, in burying the slave past, the traumatic histories of rape are buried with it. Without a platform to excavate this trauma in the national space, there is a resulting disidentification with the nation among the women of colour it fails to represent. Additionally, I suggest that the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders that undeniably ensued postslavery, including Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS) and what Joy DeGruy calls Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), are ultimately undealt with and therefore have potentially intergenerational, melancholic ramifications. In narrating the lives of mixed-race characters, both Cliff and Wicomb reveal shame's transgenerational chokehold, resulting from neglected legacies of trauma. For the protagonists' ancestors, shame results in the denial of blackness, which manifests as a lost ideal among their descendants. As the search for identity collapses with ethnognesis and the reclamation of the black mother, Clare Savage's, Marion Campbell's, and David Dirkse's trauma remains unresolved, leading to a state of melancholia and unbelonging. Because the national scripts in Jamaica and South Africa are so exclusive, it becomes necessary to invent alternative modes of belonging. The projects of rememory and memory justice have the power to engender this sense of belonging, and therefore also create a platform for past trauma to be reconciled. In conclusion, I posit that the mining of folklore is crucial in the search for slave memory and collective healing, but also, when the erasure of slave memory has rendered these stories hidden, it is important to generate our own stories, memories, and truths.

In this dissertation I intervene in and challenge already-existing critical studies of Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) that focus on ideas of imperialism, empire and subject-making practices in the novel by arguing for a revisionist reading of The Waves as a Bildungsroman. Unlike the Bildungsroman of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which utilised standard novelistic conventions to explore the relation between form and reality, I contend that The Waves is a thoroughly modernist reinvention of the Bildungsroman form designed to capture a rapidly industrialising and modernising English society. To capture the socio-political unrest in twentieth-century England at this time, Woolf deviates from the convention of a single-protagonist narration, using multiple perspectives to expose the contradictions in processes of self-formation, especially with regard to the relation between the self, nation and national identity. The correspondence between self, nation and national identity is explored through the silent seventh character, Percival, who I argue is characterised as a hero in the medieval romance tradition to expose the romantic and heroic fictional narratives that provided the framework for ideas of empire and imperialism, then at the core of nationhood and national identity in England. Conversely I argue that the character who narrates a third of the novel's narrative, Bernard, provides us with an alternative to empire and imperialism in subject-making practices. I argue that in the final section of The Waves Bernard deviates from the direct-speech narrative of preceding sections of the novel and engages the reader directly. The reader is thus alerted not only to his or her role as a reader, but also to Bernard's overarching role as primary protagonist in the novel. The reader has progressed alongside Bernard through the narrative in keeping with the genre designation of the Bildungsroman which encourages the progression of the reader alongside the progression of the primary protagonist. The reader is further encouraged in his or her progression by an aesthetic education present in the music and poetry that Woolf incorporates not only in the content, but in the very structure of the text. Two of the novel's characters, Louis and Neville, use poetry to locate their subjectivities within larger historical narratives, while Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B♭ major, Opus 130, informs the structure of the text, contributing to the interactive sonic and non-sonic landscape that actively invites the participation of the reader. The reader's participation in the novel is most fully realised when Bernard addresses the reader directly in the final section of The Waves. This interaction explains and thus concretises Woolf's overarching critiques of empire and imperialism in the novel alongside her proposed methods - which directly oppose the ideology of imperialism - for developing a subjectivity formed in relation to the common, and the individual experience of the common as a historically and materially determined phenomenon. The common in this sense is a community of 'common reading subjects', who like Woolf are not formally educated, but develop a subjectivity through reading premised on an equality of intelligence which enables them to engage critically with, order and make sense of the society and politics of their surrounding world. In this way, I show that Woolf challenges the already existing subject-making practices in twentieth-century England by exposing the contradictions - the exclusion of the marginalised, the poor and women - in ideas of Englishness. She proposes an alternative form of subject-making that is as diverse as her reading public and premised on a non-exclusionary acknowledgement of an equality of intelligence that defies class, gender and social boundaries.

Includes abstract. / This study examines literature by Zimbabwean women that explores evictions and migrations of people from 2000 to 2009 when the crisis subsided with the enactment of the Global Political Agreement (GPA).

The Thousand and One Nights is often brushed aside as a manifestation of a long-ago past, its stories recast in orientalist tropes and scoured for clues to the secrets of foreign cultures. Yet, increasingly, scholars are engaging with the text in more complex ways, realising that to read it in this manner is to chain it to a context with which it was never entirely familiar. Born out of centuries of dissemination and cross-pollination, the Nights is better understood as a dynamic thing, a work produced in its movement through time and place. It therefore asks that we find a mode of reading suited to its restlessness, one that accounts for what, in The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski identifies as "the transtemporal liveliness of texts". Such a reading draws us towards a discussion of the text not simply as something that we can hold but as a phenomenon, as more thing than object. By looking at the text-as-thing alongside the things in the text, we can see the many ways in which the Nights can be considered what Marina Warner describes as a world of stories "lodged in goods" that are alive and sentient. Making use of Warner's insightful study of the text, Stranger Magic, together with Felski's literary reworking of Actor–Network Theory, this thesis explores the thing-culture of the Nights, looking at how the saturation of the text's historical and fictional worlds with objects, both worldly and otherworldly, reveals more than simply the artefacts of bygone eras. By recognising the agency of things, the thesis proposes, it is possible that we come closer to a method of reading that treats the text with neither reverence nor suspicion and, in doing so, reveal the ways in which the Nights is able to contribute to understandings of our own thing-culture and current literary praxes.

This thesis examines the impact of urbanisation on Zimbabwean culture, particularly the Shona culture as it is represented in Zimbabwean literature. My main argument in this thesis is that Zimbabwean literature suggests that urbanisation is harmful and destructive to the Shona culture and the way of life of the Shona people.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86). / This dissertation explores the construction of the subject via a relationship of power in two poem sequences, 'The circle game' and 'Two-headed poems', by Margaret Atwood. I argue that Atwood proposes a subject similar to the kind of subject found in psychoanalysis. Like the psychoanalytic subject, Atwood's subject is formed in relation to its other. This relation is essentially a power relation and can become unbalanced, forcing one of the two parties into a subjugated position. Atwood not only exposes these skewed relations of power, but also explores possible solutions for escaping or reconfiguring these relationships. The first chapter briefly discusses theories of the subject by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. I use Hegel's dialectic between the 'master' and 'bondsman', and subsequent psychoanalytic and postcolonial applications of it, to examine the construction of the subject in terms of an other in Chapter 2. Postcolonial map theory and Kristeva's ideas on the abject are used to verbalize the divisions, but also the interactions, between the subject and its other as well as possibilities of escape. Chapter 3 demonstrates these power relationships, and their expression in cartographic terms, in 'The circle game'. In Chapter 4, I show how processes analogous to the eruption of poetic language into the symbolic order are described in the poetry. Even though these processes do not provide a clear-cut solution to the position of the subjected, their presence signals the possibility of renegotiating unbalanced relationships of power.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-97). / Larkin's place in the genealogy of English poetry is significant since, unlike many of his predecessors, his work lacks the hope or possibility of redemption offered by faith. Larkin countered the void created by his agnosticism by appealing to the power both of ritual and of the English landscape, and yet ultimately these attempts - although not wholly unsuccessful poetically - appear fruitless philosophically. Larkin's awareness of English society is not explicit, and yet his preoccupation with death and nothingness is inexorably linked to the political despair and religious questioning of post-war England. Through the use of the many' Englishes' of his time Larkin manages to construct a passable means by which to fill the lacuna left by godlessness. A thorough review of the critical opinion of Larkin is undertaken here, in order to sketch out the landscape of English letters and Larkin's place within, or in relation to, English poetry. His interrogation of the dominant societal structures is rigorous, and while his habit of constantly contradicting himself and his insistent ambiguity may seem to undermine his efforts, on closer inspection this lack of clarity complements his aims precisely. This dissertation will demonstrate how Larkin's use of cliche epitomises this struggle, and that in his poetry the often-assumed emptiness of such language is turned on its head. Larkin, it will be argued, deploys common English expressions as a modem substitute for the social links provided to earlier poets by means of reference to classical mythology.