Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of German Studies. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2009/06/09). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Roger I. Simon.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-206). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--McGill University, 2008. / Written for the Dept. of German Studies. Includes bibliographical references.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

“Missing Homes” examines three nineteenth-century authors whose experiences of displacement from home, professions and/or class influenced their literary innovations. Displacement is not a new theme to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, who have established it as a defining experience of an era characterized by financial crises, industrial development, migration and empire. However, scholarship on displacement has often focused on how novels train readers to manage the experience of displacement and has depicted the emotions like nostalgia that arise from it as potentially compensatory or reconciliatory to the dynamics of capitalism. “Missing Homes” departs from these narratives to explore authors who found displacement anything but manageable or liberating and whose works illustrate a more unstable spectrum of emotional responses to displacement and its dire long-term consequences. Attention to these authors, I argue, offers a parallel theory of nostalgia in which the unsettled longing for a place to call home registers political discontent with the relationship between the individual and the collective rather than reconciles the individual to displacement. Departing from critics who have focused primarily on the work performed by metaphors and figures of the domestic, “Missing Homes” engages in biographical readings of the lives, economic circumstances and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens to show how they pursued fantasies of securing homes that could remove them from undesirable personal, economic and political conditions. The failures of these fantasies reveal how conventional narratives describing how individuals might attain security often fail in the face of collective economic conditions in which attaining objects like a home is both economically challenging and often emotionally unfulfilling. Although the variables of their lives were different, I suggest that these authors’ stories of displacement fail to perform therapeutic or intervening work, because the problem of displacement is rooted in material conditions that narrative innovation alone cannot resolve. Instead, readers should derive from these texts and their failures the need for more collective forms of security.

This dissertation delves into the portrayal of Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century Jewish messiah who converted to Islam, within 20th-century literary works. Specifically, it scrutinizes how this historical figure is woven into literature and delves into the significance of his portrayal in works written in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. Utilizing Fred Davis’s insights on nostalgia’s correlation with historical disruptions and Svetlana Boym’s notions of nostalgia for both the past and future, this study interprets Sabbatai Zevi’s melancholic demeanor and his followers’ disillusionment with his conversion as manifestations of a concept termed here as “melancholic nostalgia,” denoting feelings of irretrievable loss. Given that these literary pieces emerged during pivotal moments in 20th-century Jewish history, this dissertation asserts that Sabbatai Zevi’s literary representation serves as a poignant symbol of melancholic nostalgia, resonating with the profound shifts in modern Jewish narrative.

Aspects of memory and identity with reference to the prose of Dana Snyman will be reflected in this research report. Concepts from memory studies, such as cultural and collective memory, collective identity as well as nostalgia and loss will serve as the matrix for a reading of his narratives. The reception of Weg, an Afrikaans outdoor magazine (and specifically the contri- butions by Snyman) amongst readers typified as the Weg-generation will be studied. Since the political transformation of 1994, there has been a renewed attempt by Afri- kaners to explore their identity and status in the new dispensation. Snyman’s nostalgic representation of this process can be linked to a current trend in Afrikaans literature where identity and roots are explored in order to redefine Self and Other. His stories document the Afrikaner culture of a bygone era with a view of coming to terms with that past. / Afrikaans / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans))

Aspects of memory and identity with reference to the prose of Dana Snyman will be reflected in this research report. Concepts from memory studies, such as cultural and collective memory, collective identity as well as nostalgia and loss will serve as the matrix for a reading of his narratives. The reception of Weg, an Afrikaans outdoor magazine (and specifically the contri- butions by Snyman) amongst readers typified as the Weg-generation will be studied. Since the political transformation of 1994, there has been a renewed attempt by Afri- kaners to explore their identity and status in the new dispensation. Snyman’s nostalgic representation of this process can be linked to a current trend in Afrikaans literature where identity and roots are explored in order to redefine Self and Other. His stories document the Afrikaner culture of a bygone era with a view of coming to terms with that past. / Afrikaans / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans))