This study examines the theme of betrayal in three different literary works.Betrayal is seen in different forms in the three novels. In the first chapter of the thesis, the protagonist&rsquo / s betrayal to his friend in the English writer Joseph Conrad&rsquo / s Under Western Eyes is evaluated in terms of the reasons, process, and results. Psychological analysis of the character that betrays is made. In the second chapter adultery is examined in The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham, who is another English writer. The reasons for the adultery the woman commits, her guilty conscience after the adultery, and the enlightenment process are discussed. In the third chapter, two characters&rsquo / betrayal to their ideology is examined with the background set as Turkey in the 1970s in Bir D&uuml / g&uuml / n Gecesi by Adalet Agaoglu, who is a Turkish writer. Psychological status of the characters is studied based on their feelings at a wedding night with their reasons to have deviated from their political views.Themes such as lack of love and dilemma, which collect the three novels under the same title, are particularly examined.

The aim of this thesis is to discuss the similarities between Kafka&rsquo / s The Trial, &ldquo / The Metamorphosis&rdquo / and &ldquo / The Judgement&rdquo / , and Pinter&rsquo / s plays namely, The Birthday Party, Old Times, Ashes to Ashes and The Dumb Waiter, in terms of their characters&rsquo / problems concerning their existence and their manners of dealing with these issues. The thesis argues that, as a consequence of being thrown into a meaningless world, characters created by Kafka and Pinter have to deal with existential problems like being alienated, having a limited freedom due to their facticity, and being subject to menace, the source of which is beyond their knowledge. It is also discussed that the characters of these writers apply similar methods / such as dominating the others and resorting to inauthentic existence, concerning their manner of dealing with the problems they face. In other words, this study intends to highlight the fact that both Kafka and Pinter reflect the situation of man, looking for a meaningful, secure existence in an absurd world, filled with disillusionment, loss of faith and failure of communication. Key

The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern British Female Gothic fiction in terms of its abject representations of female desire which subvert the patriarchal definition of female sexuality as repressed and female identity as the object of desire. The study analyzes texts from postmodern Female Gothic fiction which are feminist rewritings of the traditional Gothic narratives. The conventional Gothic plot is based on the Oedipal development of identity which excludes the (m)other and deprives the female from autonomous subjectivity. The feminist rewritings of the conventional Gothic plot have a subversive aim to recast the Oedipal identity formation and they embrace the (m)other figure in order to blur the strict boundaries between the subject and the object. Besides, these rewritings aim to destroy the image of the victimized heroine within the imprisoning conventional Gothic structures and transgress the cultural, social and sexual definitions of women constructed by patriarchal sexual politics. The study bases its analyses on Jean Rhys&rsquo / s Wide Sargasso Sea, Angela Carter&rsquo / s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Emma Donoghue&rsquo / s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins as examples in which patriarchal definition of the female desire as passive is destroyed and the female desire as active is promoted by the adoption of abject representations, which challenge the strictly constructed hierarchical relationships between men and women. Basing its argument on Julia Kristeva&rsquo / s psychoanalytical theories, which re-vision the traditional psychoanalytical theories, this study puts forward that by the emergence of postmodernism, which has overtly provided a ground for the marginalized discourses to get into dialogue with the oppressive ones, the abject representations of female desire have gained a positive characteristic that can liberate female body from the control and authority of the male-dominated ideology. Thus, one can chronologically follow the positive development of abject representations of female sexuality in Rhys&rsquo / s, Carter&rsquo / s and Donoghue&rsquo / s works which promote a liberation for the Gothic heroines from patriarchal psychoanalytical identity development, which render female desire active and female body expressive, which rehistoricize female sexuality from a feminist lens and which call for a new world order built upon an egalitarian basis that destroys hierarchically constructed gender roles. As a result, postmodern British Female Gothic Fiction is proved to be offering a utopian ideal of an egalitarian society, but although utopian and radical, not an impossible one to be realized.

This study examines codes of oppression reflected in western myths and further analyzes the ways these myths are revisited in two contemporary British and American women playwrights&#039 / , Liz Lochhead and Cherrie Moraga&#039 / s, dramatic adaptations and rewritings. In this respect a postcolonial feminist approach and a comparative perspective are adopted in rereading signs of gender, ethnic or racial and hierarchical oppression through the challenging and revolutionary, feminist and Scottish, lesbian and Chicana representations by Moraga, respectively.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the use of Gothic elements in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle&rsquo / s Sherlock Holmes stories. It begins with an overview of Gothic and detective fiction, pointing out the Gothic novels published in the late Victorian period, and referring to the Gothic influence on Poe, Dickens, and Collins who are important writers in the development of detective fiction. In this way, it is revealed that the presence of Gothic elements in the Sherlock Holmes stories is part of the writing fashion of the era. The thesis then analyses the Holmes stories which present significant Gothic elements in terms of terror, horror and the supernatural. In addition, it examines the whole Holmes canon in an endeavour to find out the Sherlock Holmes character&rsquo / s similarity to the Byronic hero who often appears in Gothic fiction. As a result, this study shows that Gothic elements contribute to the Sherlock Holmes stories in two ways. Firstly, they add to the depiction of minor characters, the setting, and the atmosphere of these stories. Secondly, they manifest themselves in the portrayal of the character of Holmes himself. Thus, the use of Gothic elements enables Doyle to create suspenseful and surprising stories with a strikingly memorable detective figure.

This thesis proposes to demonstrate the representation of women in the 19th-century fiction through an analysis of the characters in George Eliot&rsquo / s Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy&rsquo / s The Return of the Native and Tess of the D&rsquo / Urbervilles. The study starts with an outline of the intellectual and industrial transformations shaping women&rsquo / s position in the 19th century in addition to the already existing prejudices about men&rsquo / s and women&rsquo / s roles in the society. The decision of marriage and its consequences are placed earlier in these novels, which helps to lay bare the women&rsquo / s predicaments and the authors&rsquo / treatment of the female characters better. Therefore, because of marriage&rsquo / s centrality to the novels as a theme, the analysis focuses on the female subordination with its educational, vocational and social extensions, the women&rsquo / s expectations from marriage, their disappointments, and their differing responses respectively. Finally, the analogous and different aspects of the attitudes of the two writers are discussed as regards their portrayal of the characters and the endings they create for the women in their novels.

This thesis aims to explore the categories of sexuality and gender through an analysis of Jeanette Winterson&rsquo / s well-known novels, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the body, against the background of Butler&rsquo / s concept of performativity and Cixous&rsquo / s &eacute / criture feminine. By underlining the constructedness of these categories and questioning the boundaries of patriarchal concepts and transgressing them, Winterson deconstructs the binary oppositions created by phallocentric discourse and problematizes the verdict that sexuality is inborn. Instead of this ingrained notion, she asserts that gender and sexual identities are culturally and discursively constructed by the dominant discourse. Although the dominant discourse favors heterosexuality over homosexuality and degrades sexuality into a binary frame of oppositions such as masculinity/ feminity and male/female, Winterson, in her novels, seeks an alternative to escape this ideological binarism and achieves to subvert the binary oppositions by highlighting the fluidity of sexuality and gender, and by creating amorphous characters like the ungendered narrator in Written on the body or by bestowing on them bisexuality or homosexuality as in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Hence, the main argument of this thesis will be to display Winterson&rsquo / s deconstruction and dissolution of the patriarchal categories in her novels and to emphasize her escape from the binary charade, in a fictional universe, with references to Butlerian performativity and Cixousian &eacute / criture feminine.

This study approaches myths as patriarchal narratives and ideological tools and it argues that representations of women from an androcentric perspective in Greek mythology are also observed in the Bible. This study argues that patriarchy as a universal ideology has produced the same gender stereotypes beginning from Ancient Greece. Consequently, Western literature, which has the Classical and Biblical tradition as its main source, has reinforced the same female images throughout its history. Besides, it is suggested that, the Western canon failed to create alternative female models for the binary opposition of submissive wives versus the female evil figure and the main stereotypical characteristics had not been challenged until the emergence of feminist criticism. This study thus aims to discuss myths as one of the foremost sites of the construction of ideological subjects and it analyses the rewritings of Greek, Old Testament and New Testament myths by contemporary women writers in fiction / namely Margaret Atwood&rsquo / s The Penelopiad, Marion Zimmer Bradley&rsquo / s The Firebrand, Anita Diamant&rsquo / s The Red Tent, India Edghill&rsquo / s Queenmaker, Gail Sidonie Sobat&rsquo / s The Book of Mary and Mich&eacute / le Roberts&rsquo / The Wild Girl and it explores the textual strategies that are employed by women writers in order to subvert and revise the patriarchal ideology in myths, to come up with alternative definitions of female identity and to weave gynocentric myths.

This thesis analyzes William Golding&rsquo / s Rites of Passage using a detailed examination of the Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque to investigate the points of mutual illumination and confirmation between Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas and Golding&rsquo / s novel. Therefore the method of analysis is divided between a close study of Rites of Passage and an equally close examination of Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas. The Bakhtinian concepts studied in this thesis are central to his idea of language and theory of the novel and their analysis in Rites of Passage reveals that while these concepts shed light on the stylistic, structural and thematic complexities of the novel, the novel also verifies the working of these concepts in practice. Moreover, the results of the analysis indicate two main points in which Golding&rsquo / s novel and Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas confirm and illuminate each other. The first point is related to Bakhtin&rsquo / s celebration of the novel genre for its capacity to include diverse elements, a celebration that find its counterpart in Golding&rsquo / s novel due to the novel&rsquo / s heteroglot nature, polyphonic structure and inclusion of the carnivalesque. The second point is related to Bakhtin&rsquo / s notion of dialogism which emerges as a relational property common to his mentioned concepts. As this thesis shows, Golding&rsquo / s Rites of Passage is a dialogic novel in this regard, with its foregrounding of dialogic relations between heteroglot languages, characters&rsquo / voices and social classes. This thesis ends with a discussion indicating postmodern aspects of Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas and Golding&rsquo / s novel, which include intertextuality, the problematization of truth, and the blurring of boundaries between opposites.

This thesis analyses the difficulties in reading modern poetry that arise out of not the references but the unconventional use of language, and presents them in a theoretical framework based on Julia Kristeva&rsquo / s semanalytic theory and Melanie Parsons&rsquo / s application of it to a comparison of Nonsense literature and twentieth century poetry. Then aspects of the works of G. M. Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell are discussed and poems by these poets are analysed within this framework.