This is a collection of short stories.

Roberto and his family moved to the United States from his native El Salvador after his older brother drowned on a desolate beach. As an adult, he returns to that same beach to reconcile with what his brother’s death has meant to his life and what he missed out on by being raised as an American. On that beach, he encounters Laurencio, an old fisherman who seems to empathize with Roberto and shares with him the legend of Hugo el Maximo, also a fisherman who was dragged away by the ocean but resurfaces and endures a difficult journey as he returns to his village. Entranced by the legend, Roberto listens to Laurencio, and his own difficulties and unresolved issues about origin, immigration, and identity surface as Hugo’s story unfurls.

<p>Situating Hamilton, Ontario within the global context of economic restructuring incited by capitalist, neoliberal ideologies, I argue that Hamilton, a “city on the verge of renaissance” (Hume A6), needs to be guided by a more inclusive, citizen-led approach to “rebuilding” the city. To critically understand the complex power imbalances underlying this dominant culture of “rebuild,” I will examine the multifaceted concept of resilience, seeing it as both a tool of domination used by those in power over the public sphere, as well as a personal and communal process that can encompass positive adaptation and growth in the face of change. A key question to be asked throughout is: “Resilience for what and for whom?” (Cote and Nightingale 475). While each chapter will be foregrounded with pertinent theory, I will look to various forms of literature based in Hamilton in order to seek nuanced and imaginative understandings of the current climate of “resilience” that are specific to this place.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis discusses performative identity in Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack and Nightwood. Barnes' characters create and perform their identities as an attempt to escape or subvert patriarchal norms and societal prejudices. In analyzing the marginalized performative identity categories (race, class, gender, sexuality), one can glean an understanding of the complex social tensions present during Barnes' era, and understand the socially constructed, confining nature of identity itself.

This paper examines the differences between the Romantic, the Gothic, and the Dark Romantic literary genres by looking at the manifestations of the trope of the double within the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The notion of the individual versus that of individualism helps highlight the disparity between Gothicism and Dark Romance, and the implications that these differences hold.

This thesis analyzes Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons through the framework of the cult of domesticity. In understanding the ways in which Stein mocks and transgresses gender constrictions, while simultaneously adopting the language of domesticity, I understand the ways in which Stein breaks with the antebellum notion of separate spheres.

This essay explores modern queer readings of The Awakening and Ruth Hall, with an emphasis on feeling, time, femininity, and maternity.

We are forever shaped by the worlds we live in. The following stories are musings on the importance of time and place and on the conflicts that arise for characters who are born into and who live with or rail against those forces. The stories are set in and around Laurel County, Georgia over a period of decades. They look at the people who are made there and the lessons they learn or fail to learn as they work to make their way there.

Since the death of Carson McCullers in 1967, there has been no revival of interest in her work, and there has been little critical study done in regard to it. All of McCullers' stories have Southern settings, and most are set in her native Georgia. She uses folk materials (as do Faulkner, Welty and Warren), but the limitations which these impose are transcended, and the fiction becomes an "examination of universal moral circumstances."1 McCullers does not exploit local color, which, as Robert Penn Warren has noted, is often "incomplete and unphilosophical."2 Rather than treating locale for its own sake, she uses it, as do many other Southern writers, as a means of dramatizing themes which are universal. Previous studies have included those done in regard to the Southern settings of McCullers' novels, her use of musical structure, and the Gothic elements in her fiction. There has been, however, no study of paradox as that skeleton around which the novels are structured. This thesis will focus on some paradoxical elements of the fiction of Carson McCullers; these will be limited to two motifs: the eye and the quest, and two themes: love-hate and community-isolation. 1. Frederick J. Hoffman, The Art of Southern Fiction: A Study of Some Modern Novelists (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 11. 2. Robert Penn Warren, "Not Local Color," The Virginia Quarterly Review, VIII (January 1932), 154.

Although Updike has been recognized as one of the few contemporary writers worthy of serious consideration, critics and reviewers are not in accord about the acclaim that he has received. They cannot agree that Updike has anything worthwhile to say about the fundamental questions basic to contemporary fiction. Updike has been accused of dealing in sentimentalities and trivialities, while touching only slightly problems important to the human condition. Most critics agree that his style is excellent, but some feel that Updike is using this particular skill to cover up the shallowness of his thought. However, throughout Updike's novels major themes are apparent. This thesis treats two of them: the themes of the decay of love relations and of the decay of religious life, which are conspicuous in his fiction. In handling both themes, Updike is especially conscious of the past and its relation to the present. The past for Updike signifies the time when man believed in the Vorican Dream and lived by the inspiration and guidance of the ideals embodied in it. Updike's major statement of this concept appears in The Poorhouse Fair, but is evident in all his novels. A primary concern in Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm, and Couples is the disintegration of love and religion. In general, Updike believes that the positive and necessary values realized in love and religion were strong and efficacious in the past, while modern life has witnessed their decay and corruption. Apparently Updike envisions modern love as an antidote to the boredom of the modern society. It is entirely selfish, a for-the-moment-only encounter, not meant to lead to a lasting relationship. Modern love contains none of the qualities of honor, respect, or fidelity that once were so binding in a union of man and woman. Lost also is familial love and the sense of responsibility involved in it. In treating the decay of religion Updike seems especially interested in the loss of significance of traditional religious thought. The ideas and rituals of the past have no place in modern society. Religious symbols are meaningless; they offer no comfort or basis of redemption to modern man. Morality does not exist; God has become a nobody, and death is a finality. Updike has written many outstanding short stories in which the germs of his thought can be found. However, since Updike is a recognized novelist, only his five novels will be considered in tracing the general context of the relation of present to past, and within that context, two particular thematic centers of interest: the decay of love and the decay of religion. Implicit in Updike's concern for the decline of older idealisms is a very urgent and very serious appeal to a world that is in danger of forgetting what ought to be cherished.