The concept of a distinctively South African poetry in English has been, and still is, derided as a "pipe dream" as part of the fallacy which stems from the desire for a "national" literature. In 1955, for instance, C.J. Harvey (in an article containing much common sense as well as sound literary judgment) denounced the self-conscious hunting for "Local Colour" which engrosses so many South African writers. Harvey claimed: "Our civilization is not "South African", except in trivial details, it is Western European, and more specifically as far as poetry written in English is concerned, English ... ". There is a serious error of emphasis here. It would be more accurate to say that our ancestors brought Western European civilization to this continent. To imagine that this civilisation has not undergone and is not still constantly suffering a subtle but far-reaching metamorphosis in Africa would be to fly in the face of reality. White South Africans do not only carry the same identity-card but they can be distinguished from Frenchmen, Englishmen or Irishmen by more than "trivial details". This thesis is an examination of some af the earliest English written in southern Africa, particularly of the verse produced by our poetasters and near-poets. It attempts, during the course of this examination, to call attention to a few of the more significant changes which have arisen as the result of the importation of Western civilsation to an African frontier. Further I hope to show some at the varying ways in which these differences affected the white pioneer and how this has been reflected in our verse since pioneering times. In this sense the Frontier may be thought of as the background against which South African English writers developed certain characteristic traits. Intro., p. 1-2.

This study examined male and female characters in award-winning English language Canadian children's literature for evidence of gender equality. The sample consisted of seventy-eight books that had been winners or runners-up of national awards between 1982 and 1992. Qualitative and quantitative methods of content analysis were used to collect data from which the ratio of male characters to female characters was calculated for the titles, cover illustrations, text, illustrations in the body of the books, and main and supporting characters. A list of eighteen activities, categorized as active/mobile or passive/immobile, was used to identify the activities engaged in by the main and supporting characters. A list of four locations was used to determine the location of each activity. Careers/occupations were listed for all characters. Results indicated more references to females than males in the titles of the books, and an equal number of males and females portrayed on the cover illustrations. However, results from the text and the illustrations in the body of the books revealed twice as many male characters as females. There was a higher ratio of male to female main and supporting characters as well. Results of data collected on activities/locations indicated that female main and supporting characters dominated the passive/immobile activities. Active/mobile activities were dominated by female main characters and male supporting characters. Females dominated the home and outdoors locations, while males dominated place of business and school locations. Male characters performed a greater diversity of careers/occupations than did female characters, and were involved in 66% of the total number of careers/occupations. Findings of this study support the trend toward a reduction in gender bias found in earlier studies. However, the overall results suggest some gender biases in the representation and portrayal of male and female characters. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871) is a writer whose work enjoyed immense popularity in his lifetime. Today, however, he is largely forgotten or ignored. This thesis proposes the rehabilitation of Nickler in German literary history. His work, consisting mainly of travelogues, achieves a stylistic distinction comparable to that of Heinrich Heine, and depicts events, places and people with a political and social perception that shows him to have been far ahead of his time. Nickler has always been a controversial figure. Though seen by some of his contemporaries as one of Germany's most influential and eloquent liberal travelogue-writers, he was also denounced as a second-rate poet who pandered to the aristocracy. As far as it exists, modern Nickler scholarship grants his work its deserved position in the genre of travel literature, but does not fully recognize its importance as politically and socially committed writing. For most of his life Pückler was interested in social and political questions. During his travels in Great Britain (1826-1828), documented in the Briefe eines Verstorbenen, he was introduced to the English political system. Henceforth, he proclaimed the need for a German constitutional monarchy. While travelling in Ireland he witnessed the struggle of the Irish people and became a strong supporter of the Irish emancipation movement. In Germany, he came in close contact with the group of writers known as "Junges Deutschland." Their writings were outlawed by the authorities in 1835, because of their treatment of political issues ranging from freedom of the press, autonomy of the universities, and constitutional questions, to the need for greater social justice. When he raised these issues in Tutti Frutti (1834), Nickler narrowly escaped a ban on the publication of his works, for some reactionary circles considered him a liberal agitator. Indeed, both Nickler's early pieces and his later work, such as the travel narrative Süd Ostlicher Bildersaal(1840), depicting the Wittelsbacher reign in Greece and the author’s association with the autocratic King of the Greeks, Otto I, demonstrate liberal conviction and progressive political thinking. This thesis examines critically Nickler's writings about England, Ireland, Germany und Greece, traces the author’s attitudes towards historical circumstances and personages and argues for the importance of his work and for its location close to that of other "Young German" writers, such as Heine, Borne or Herwegh. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation comprises a historical survey and thematic analysis of the various regional and temporal expressions of Chinese and Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue (“nativism” or “homeland literature”). Chapter One traces Chinese xiangtu wenxue from the rural stories of Lu Xun through the 1920s generation of writers of xiangtu wenxue (xiangtu zuojia f’g). These writers used two different narrative modes to analyze China’s deepening rural crisis. One of these was the antitraditionalist mode inspired by Lu Xun; the other was a positivist mode formulated from new concepts and intellectual thought prevalent in China at the time of May Fourth (1919). The narrative configuration established by this decade of xiangtu writers is characterized by nostalgia and is based on the migration of the Chinese village intellectual to large urban centres. This configuration set the standard for subsequent generations of writers of xiangtu wenxue who used an urban narrator to describe a rural area which was either the author’s native home, an area he/she knew well or one which was idealized. Chapters Two and Five discuss Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue from the 1920s to the 1970s. The emergence of this fiction is linked with Taiwan’s insecure status in the forum of international relations. In Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue, the countryside is a refuge from the forces of modernization; it is also a storehouse nurturing ancient traditions which are threatened by new and modern ways. Taiwan’s xiangtu writers valorize traditional culture and seek in rural Taiwan a transcendent China predating Taiwan’s invasion by the West. These works are all narrated by an urban narrator who rejects modernity and desires to counteract foreign influences. The focus of Chapter Three is China’s rural regional xiangtu wenxue of the 1930s. In this decade, rural fiction became a general trend in China with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, Japanese aggression and China’s increasing urbanization. The shift away from China’s urban-based fiction is characterized by an increasing concern for the peasants, regional decay under the onslaught of Westernization and the life, customs and lore of China’s hinterland. In many of these regional works, concern for the nation is interwoven with non-nationalistic interests. Chinese xiangtu wenxue of the 1940s and 1950s is discussed in Chapter Four. The xiangtu wenxue of this period took on a distinctly Communist guise in the wake of Mao Zedong’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Chinese Communist xiangtu wenxue is primarily defined as revolutionary realism and is concerned with the construction of Chinese socialism which takes place in the countryside through the forced implementation of draconian Party policies. The peasants in this fiction often attempt to evade these policies. Occasionally, these stories and novels slip into a hardcore realistic mode conveying a peasant reality which strongly dissents from the orthodox Party view. At least one writer of this period was persecuted and killed for his putatively disloyal beliefs. Finally, with the passing of Maoism in China, a new form of xiangtu wenxue emerged in the mid-1980s. This is the subject of Chapter Six. In these works, traditional Chinese culture supercedes Maoism as the basic fabric unifying Chinese life. Many of the writers in this period evince a psychological bifurcation arising from their conflicting views about the value of traditional Chinese culture. This bifurcation stems from the narrator in this fiction who is caught up in the process of urbanization and is unable to fully integrate his vision of the countryside into a larger vision of modernity. The ambivalence about Chinese culture in xiangtu wenxue is a leitmotif which underlies xiangtu wenxue’s many, disparate forms. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation focuses on the emergence of self-awareness in women of the early 17th century as exemplified by Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638), a native of Greifswald in North Germany. It analyses the feminist components of her work. Her poetic production, preserved in the anthology Deutsche Poetische Gedichte (1650), consists of 105 poems, four prose introductions and three letters. It is the output of a writer whose short life of 17 years plays itself out against the backdrop of a century shattered by the Thirty Years' War, religious strife, the plague, oppression and social unrest. Topics such as friendship, love, female self-awareness, or the contrasting realities of women and men are the themes through which she explores an androcentric society and establishes herself as an advocate for the acceptance of women as full members of society. With her motto Du solst mich doch nicht unterdrucken ("You shall not suppress me") she insists on her equality as a woman and a writer. The defiance of her "natural" role as a woman expresses itself ambivalently, through observing social conventions while at the same time striving to undermine them. Sibylle Schwarz, unlike any other German bourgeois woman author between 1550 and 1650, has written poetry engaging in social criticism that corroborates and at the same time transcends the inferior status of women within a patriarchal structure. This unique nature of her writings makes them an important milestone in the emergence of female intellectual autonomy. The first two of six major sections state the goals of my research, a survey of the materials used and the methodology to be followed. Part III sets the context of a society in which women were limited to a narrow range of roles. In Part IV the conditions in which women lived, worked, and were brought up, from the institutionalised lack of educational opportunity to social, conventional and legal barriers to their full participation in society are being explored. Part V gives an extensive analysis of Sibylle Schwarz's work, relating it to her personal situation and to the themes already developed, with an accounting of her thoughts and ideas about her culture, her society and her gender. Part VI summarises the work and states its conclusions. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

This study examines six texts o f the 12[sup th] and 13[sup th] centuries for the fantastic mode. It first refutes the critical assertion that the fantastic could not exist in medieval literature, but also establishes that most of the casually denominated "fantastic" is not. For the genuine fantastic, both in general and in its medieval appearances, questions of reality are at most peripheral. Rather the fantastic mode encodes itself in the narrative structure, creating ambiguity and openness. The structural approach frees the discussion o f the fantastic from theories predicated upon issues of thematics, reality-based analysis, and didactic categorizations o f supernatural objects. The first two chapters synthesize those elements from modern works of fantastic theory, (re)deflning the fantastic based upon a semiotic approach. The introduction concentrates on the need to reexamine the corpus of critical works addressing the fantastic. Chapter 1 summarizes the theoretical discussion in order to adjust the definition of "fantastic" as a critical term according to a more pre-Renaissance view of reality. Chapter 2 proposes the parallel worlds model as a structural model for the identification of the fantastic mode in texts where the supernatural is evident, with an emphasis on fantastic space as an intermediary locale between worlds. The last four chapters apply the parallel worlds model to a selected corpus of six narratives. While the structures of these texts vary in length, the fantastic is consistently manifested in a pattern that alternates between the real world, fantastic space and the otherworld. The open-ended structure of five narratives indicates that journeys to the otherworld are rarely accomplished with a high degree of completion, and therefore the narrative program remains incomplete. The conclusion is a defense of the fantastic within medieval French literature, concentrating on how the supernatural creates /otherness/, fantastic space and openness in the narrative program. The fantastic as a powerful but elusive force within Old French romance narratives often shifts to the merveilleioc in the end. The parallel worlds model, when used in conjunction with other theories for identifying the fantastic, is a structural method that emphasizes openness as a characteristic of the fantastic within medieval romance narratives. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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This dissertation examines vernacular saint plays in French, Italian, and English from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. It focuses on the genre of hagiographic drama as an expression of popular religion and popular culture in the Middle Ages, serving as a test of current theories pertaining to popular culture. Sociohistorical methods are employed throughout the work as a basis for determining the role of religious theater in medieval society. Contextual analyses of theoretical approaches are provided, including New Historicism, the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, and the work of Victor Turner. The chapters offer information concerning the cultic traditions that gave rise to the saint plays, an examination of social changes related to the performances, aesthetic conventions, and issues of reception.

Jewish Americans have been incredibly adept in public relations, and this study traces the ways in which Jewish narratives were used in the twentieth century to perform cultural work for the community. We Are Chosen begins with the premise that established Jews in Galveston, Montreal, New York, and Buenos Aires defined Jewishness in attractive terms in the early 1900s for political expediency, to challenge negative perceptions by non-Jews and promote esteem among Jews, and that these terms continue to inform conceptions of Jewish identity. Geographically, the project looks beyond (as well as in) New York, focuses on three dominant tropes (giving, mobility, and assimilation), and examines how and why these themes effectively translate religious election (“chosenness”) in the secular sphere. Jewish narratives and their ennobling rhetorics are often taken as a matter of course, even in the field of Jewish American Studies, but should be understood as products of a particular historical moment. As vehicles for positive public relations, Jewish narratives mask voices deemed unattractive or potentially threatening. Drawing from essays, organizational reports, periodical and historical writings, and works of Jewish American literature, individual chapters put dominant and protesting voices in conversation with one another and explore why some images are deemed “good for the Jews” and others are considered self-hating. Examining the history of Jews in other places does not detract from the importance of New York to Jewish American history or memory, but insists that there are more complex and dynamic stories that include, but are not limited to, New York and its mythic Lower East Side.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)