This thesis aims to introduce the Italian writer Grazia Deledda and analyze her three Sardinian novels: La via del male (The way of evil), Elias Portolu (Elias Portolu) and Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind). At the beginning, I briefly summarize the sociographic situation of the island of Sardinia in the middle of the 19th century as it had considerable influence on the author and her writings. I also include the bio-bibliographical section, which chronologically portrays Deledda's personal life and her literary works. The central themes of her works are passion, sin and their subsequent atonement. The protagonists suffer especially in the depths of their hearts and dialogue and struggle with their conscience. Lyrical descriptions of the land are also a distinguishing feature of Deledda's writing, together with portrayal of local traditions and customs with the occasional inserted text with Sardinian words, specifically the writer's Nuoro dialect. Finally, I try to compare all three works and attempt to locate their constant and variable features and gain insight into the female characters within Sardinian communities. In the appendix, I review the reception of Deledda in the Czech speaking lands and include a brief history of the island and Deledda's personal photos.

This study explores how subjectivity has been represented in a selection of Sorani Kurdish novels from Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan that were published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Due to the statelessness and suffering of the Kurds caused by the political and cultural oppression, the first Sorani Kurdish novel emerged as late as 1961 and yet only established itself towards the end of the century. Within such an acute context, the novel became a tool in the hands of Kurdish authors which they utilised to preserve and promote Kurdish identity, culture and language. With the establishment of cultural centres and publishing houses in diaspora during the 1980s, the establishment of a quasi-independent Kurdish region in Iraq in 1991, and the Iranian government’s easing of publication in Kurdish by the mid-1980, the Sorani Kurdish novelists seized the opportunity to redefine the relationship between political commitment and aesthetics and to consider the possibilities for an analysis of different forms of subjectivity. All the twenty-first century Sorani Kurdish novels examined in this research have discarded, to one degree or another, the realist mode of writing which dominated the Sorani Kurdish novel until the early 1990s. That is, experimentation with new modes of writing and narrative techniques are the common feature of the novels examined here. By carrying out a close reading within a contextual framework and by drawing on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, narratology, and theories of subjectivity, this study intends to illustrate the newly emergent modes of wriring and discourses in selected twenty-first century Sorani novels and their implications for the representation of reality and subjectivity. This study demonstrates that the Kurdish novelists from both Iraq and Iran all focus their attention on recent events, relevant to each region, and how they changed the ways subjectivity could be imagined and depicted. The more modernist and postmodernist in form and narration the selected novels are, the more fragmented and passive subjectivity is; and the society that is represented in these novels appears to have separated from its high values and ideals.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Daniel A. Hoyt / This project is the opening chapters of a novel in which two brothers, Txanton and Riddley, are split from each other in post-apocalyptic Kansas. The Commune of Eternal Light has been their family’s peaceful home for more than a hundred years but is crushed by a fascist army that considers killing the only way to survive in civilization’s aftermath. In this destruction, Txanton sees his father’s murder, while Riddley watches his mother’s death. After the separation, Txanton, along with several other boys from the Commune, becomes part of the very army that destroyed his family, and he is visited by the ghost of his great-great grandfather who begins telling his personal story along with the tale of the downfall of the world. Riddley, meanwhile, wanders a picaresque path in which he sees cannibals, zombies, witches, a cowboy, and other ghosts. Both boys struggle with the brutality of the wasteland they are thrust into and try to cope with the memories of their peaceful home and the deaths of their family and friends. Told in chapters that jump back-and-forth between the two brothers, the novel parallels their challenges in a close third-person narrative.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Daniel A. Hoyt / This project is the first three chapters of a young adult novel, The Muses. Lily Bellows is singled out in infancy to become one of the Muses, humans given supernatural powers through enchanted golden masks. The six Muses (Faith, Wisdom, Pride, Obedience, Courage, and Desire) are telepathically linked to Illyria’s king so that he is better able to manage his emotions and thus rule more efficiently. Lily is destined to be the Muse of Faith, but her parents fake her death and keep her abilities secret until she heals her village of a deadly plague and the Muses consequently return for her. As Lily struggles to master fighting arts, healing skills, and the ability to manipulate emotions, she must also befriend the moody Prince Connor who will one day share her consciousness, and she must untangle the complicated feelings she has for Connor’s illegitimate brother, Ronan. While Lily’s fellow Muse initiates have been training since infancy, Lily joins them as a teenager, and she finds it nearly impossible to give up her family, her dreams and her individuality so she can make Prince Connor into a better king. When she has the chance to break the oath she swore to serve her country as its Muse of Faith, she must choose between power and individuality and determine whether she must submit to her destiny or create her own.

Fiction Novel

Wells Oliver, a mathematician, and his partner Malin move to Kythera, a remote Greek island, from Canada and Sweden, their respective countries of origin. In doing so, they hope to transform their lives in a way that will allow them to focus on their budding love affair, but they are also running away from obligations and people they are trying to leave behind. On Kythera, they realize that even in the most distant locales, the past is never far below the surface.

This is an original work. It is a full length novel. The main character is Zeso Eliza Greylin.

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Thesis advisor: Mary Ann Glynn / My dissertation examines changes in audience sensemaking by the public and media about Apple’s novel product, iPad. My study begins on December 28, 2009, one-month before the introduction of the iPad by Apple and ends with the anniversary of its retail availability on April 2, 2011, shortly after the launch of the second-generation iPad. Using primarily qualitative methods, I analyze archival data including online forums and news articles to understand audience sensemaking as it unfolds. I investigate how sensemaking by the two audiences a) changes over time, b) changes with different types of material interaction with the product, c) incorporates the use of functional and symbolic frames in their public discourse about the iPad, and d) changes based on the public role of the audience. In doing so, I advance explanations as to how meanings about novel products stabilize. More broadly, I elaborate how nascent product categories can emerge by focusing on the cultural-cognitive processes that undergird product classification systems. As a result, I offer novel pathways for product category emergence. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

Thesis advisor: Maia M. McAleavey / “Singular Plots” challenges the commonplace that the marriage plot defines the nineteenth-century British novel by uncovering the plot of vocational singleness. In this plot, a heroine renounces marriage and seeks another occupation – caring for parents or siblings; participating in philanthropy, business, or art. “Singular Plots” traces the history of representations of single women, arguing that unmarried women were often represented as plotless in the early century, while around mid-century the vocational plot coalesced in novels including Brontë’s Villette, Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, and Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain. In order to uncover vocational plots that exist alongside and against marriage plots, I advocate a method of reading called “analeptic reading” in which readers pivot from the final pages back to the more radical center and outward past the end – a process that expands our notion of which moments in a plot can be definitive. The project joins recent work by scholars including Sharon Marcus and Talia Schaffer to challenge and expand our understanding of the role of the marriage plot in nineteenth-century literature. “Singular Plots” uncovers single women as a group with uniquely and instructively particular relationships to gender, marriage, work, and the form of the novel itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.