<p>This dissertation argues that social power relations in Canada are deeply tied to the cultural models of time that have been assumed and rejected throughout the country’s history, and that Canadian literature and other arts serve a vital function in both witnessing and questioning these relationships. I begin by tracing the competing temporal frameworks that have taken hold in Canada, from the Gregorian calendar, to “standard” clock time, to immigration policies that cause people who are considered undesirable to wait longer periods of time for legal status. I suggest that the profound consequences temporal structures have on social relations necessitate a sustained study of how Canadian cultural and literary productions engage with the idea of time. After outlining the contested temporalities that serve broadly as sites of power, I turn to Canadian novels, poems, plays, and visual art to explore the difficult negotiations between individual and social experiences of time. These texts reveal that while broad cultural temporalities indeed shape the measuring out of individual lives, this shaping process functions differently for different people. In particular, I examine how forms of temporal agency and disempowerment are closely linked to the categories of age, class, gender, sexuality, race, and indigeneity. Finally, I examine texts that question existing temporal structures and explore alternative temporalities. While normative temporality is often depicted as unyielding, stories about catastrophic social disruptions portray normative time as a makeshift apparatus always on the verge of collapse. Such stories indicate that while the construction of new, more just models of time is always possible, no temporal structure is free from the politics of social power relations.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This study is an examination of the developing self-consciousness of three female protagonists in three different novels. Chapter One is a discussion of the detrimental social factors that hinder the complete selfdevelopment of Hester Prynne in the seventeenth-century New England environment of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Chapter Two investigates the emerging consciousness of self of Edna Pontellier and her subsequent failure to achieve an autonomy that permits her to integrate into the confining, social climate of Chopin's nineteenth-century Creole environment in The Awakening. Chapter three is the examination of the repressive forces in the futuristic society of Gilead that serve as a barrier to the development of a unified self for Offred in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In all three chapters of the thesis, I argue that each female protagonist's struggle to successfully assert the self, and to extend the self toward genuine relationships with others, is not actualized. This study attempts to show the precarious hold of the self that the female protagonist demonstrates in each of these three works of fiction. Throughout the body of the text, an abbreviated form iii iv will be used for the three primary novels examined. The reference consists of the underlined initials of the title of the novel followed by the page number, all contained within parentheses. The abbreviations are as follows: TSL for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, TA for Chopin's The Awakening, and THT for Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.</p> / Master of English

This dissertation argues that Henry James deliberately and ingeniously wrote The Ambassadors (1903) as a double-plotted novel. The traditional plot which follows Lambert Strether to Paris provides cover for the detailed story of Strether’s experiences in Paris as a homosexual man seeking his identity. James conveys the Other Plot by means of code, the primary signifiers of which are references to the well-established homosexual subcultures of London and Paris. In-depth historical research on diverse aspects of homosexual life in the nineteenth century are presented in order to demonstrate how James addresses an audience sympathetic to same-sex love without raising condemnation from moral and literary critics.

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated American thought. This thesis also argues that the conscious use of British literature, Shakespeare in particular, by abolitionists constitutes a critique of the unfulfilled American ideals they believe slavery undermines. In addressing depictions of slave revolts and black masculinity in this period, this thesis explores how allusions to Shakespeare helped frame the historiography surrounding how slave revolts in America were and are remembered.

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.

This study attempts to complement earlier studies of Still’s literary art such as that of Dean Cadle and Katherine Craf by pointing out the integral use of folk elements in his fiction. The methodology combined field studies with investigation of the works of folklorists and historians and novelists whose writings center around the same general region as do those of Still For the purposes of this study “folk elements” will denote the orally transmitted traditions of the common people of a particular region. In this case, the “folk” are a rural people who have remained relatively stable for several generations and thereby have preserved traditions likely to disappear or modify in an urban society. These traditions include material culture with its associated arts and skills, customs, folklore and speech.

Abstract Over the last fifty years scholars have worked to recover the work of late nineteenth, early twentieth-century writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Many scholars have acknowledged the impact of New Orleans culture and history in her writing as well as attempted peel back the layers of her stories in order to understand her commentary on structures of race, class, and gender in nineteenth-century New Orleans. This hybrid paper, both creative and academic, subjective and objective, is a reading of her work through the Creole lens. Reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson through a Creole lens illuminates the radical nature of her work which has not always been seen through alternative lenses. This paper is a viewing of the work of Dunbar-Nelson from the marginal space which it illustrates and from which it comes. Through personal narrative and analytical thought this paper explores a different approach to literary criticism.

This thesis is a consideration of the intertextual relationship between William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It considers the objectification and destruction of women and female-coded men in the service of the male protagonist's journey to selfhood, with particular focus on the construction of race, gender, and class performances.

Bryan Lee O'Malley's "Scott Pilgrim" series is, arguably, one of the most important American literary works of the early twenty-first century. Evaluating this work w/r/t multimediality and simultaneous multiliteracy, emotions and affective states, friends and their informal economies, and the role of active fandoms in current artistic production, this thesis seeks to explain why "Scott Pilgrim" has found such deep resonance with a generation of kids growing up at the time of publication.

There are many different doorways into the world of book publishing and it can be challenging, but there are choices that can make it easier. Aspiring publishers often have a hard time breaking into this world because they have no guide. This thesis will be a guide to traversing the different avenues into the world of publishing. Prospective publishers, editors, and writers will be provided with a landscape of what it’s like to work in book publishing. It will also cover the two different ways that people become publishers, an overview of the basic requirements that publishing houses look for in potential employees, and the basic process of what publishers do.