In this dissertation, I examine the practice of what I term serial memoir in the second-half of the twentieth century in American literature, arguing that serial memoir represents an emerging and significant trend in life writing as it illustrates a transition in how a particular generation of writers understands lived experience and its textual representation. During the second-half of the twentieth century, and in tandem with the rapid technological advancements of postmodern and postindustrial culture, I look at the serial authorship and publication of multiple self-reflexive texts and propose that serial memoir presents a challenge to the historically privileged techniques of linear storytelling, narrative closure, and the possibility for autonomous subjectivity in American life writing. As generic boundaries become increasingly fluid, postmodern memoirists are able to be both more innovative and overt about how they have constructed the self at particular moments in time. Following the trend of examining life writing through contemporary theories about culture, narrative, and techniques of self-representation, I engage the serial memoirs of Mary McCarthy, Maya Angelou, Art Spiegelman, and Augusten Burroughs as I suggest that these authors iterate the self as serialized, recursive, genealogically constructed, and material. Finally, the fact that these are well-known memoirists underscores the degree to which serial memoir has become mainstream in American autobiographical writing. Serial memoir emphasizes such issues as temporality and memory, repetition and recursivity, and witnessing and testimony, and as such, my objective in this project is to theorize the practice of serial memoir, a form that has been largely neglected in critical work, as I underscore its significance in relation to twentieth-century American culture. I contend that seriality in contemporary American memoir is a burgeoning and powerful form of self-expression, and that a close examination of how authors are presenting and re-presenting themselves as they challenge conventional life writing narrative structures will influence not only the way we read and understand contemporary memoir, but will impact our approaches to self-reflexive narrative structures and provide us with new ways to understand ourselves, and our lives, in relation to the serial culture in which we live.

This study aims to analyze the use of parody in Jeanette Winterson&rsquo / s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Boating for Beginners. Winterson uses parody as a means to re-contextualise and re-interpret the Biblical material in a playful manner in these two novels. Moreover, parody becomes a means for her to revise certain other texts and discourses. Due to these parodic references to other texts and discourses, the novels have an intertextual structure and they are open to a variety of interpretations instead of releasing a single meaning.

This study is about British postwar fiction and its canonical reception according to a special categorisation of the novelists who were publishing in Britain during the two decades after the end of the Second World War. The study emphasises that mainstream literary criticism of 1950s and &rsquo / 60s Britain tended to catalogue the novelists of this period according to a well-established dichotomy between tradition and innovation in which the traditional realist novels, the neorealist works of C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, were privileged over any other fictional work having modernist innovative characteristics. Therefore, the first published novels of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles, novelists belonging to today&rsquo / s postmodern canon, were first critically recognised as social realist works in Britain. One of the objects of this study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of this classification. Moreover, the main argument of the study is that none of these three novelists should have been classified as a traditional realist novelist. All of these three British postwar novelists were reconceptualising traditional realism by self-reflexively including the problem of representation as part of their conventional subject matters in their formal realist novels.

<p>I uppsatsen studeras hur konstruktionen av en folkkonstnär sker i två porträtterande texter mot en bakgrund som ifrågasätter logiken i konstruktionen.</p><p>I uppsatsen tecknas en levnadsberättelse över Bernhard Jönsson, Färgaryd. Exempel ges på hans oljemåleri vilket sätts i sammanhang med den modernistiska epoken. Postmodernistiskt idégods jämförs med sydsvenskt bonadsmåleri för att finna likheter. Därnäst granskas två texter som presenterar Bernhard Jönsson som folkkonstnär.</p><p>Författaren belyser genom sina exempel hur konstruktionen av folkkonstnären bygger på ignorerande av vissa fakta. Analyserna av presentationerna visar hur folkkonstnären blir utsatt för generaliseringar, mytifiering och avintellektualisering. Författaren jämför i diskussionen de skilda konsekvenserna av att kategorisera Bernhard Jönssons sentida bonadsmåleri till folkkonsten eller postmodernismen.</p><p> </p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 308-319). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 268-297.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-150).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by Scott Romine; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 28, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-254).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Columbia International University, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 181-185).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity International University, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 351-356).