This thesis explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. I argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchal values and unsettling fixed notions of home. In each of these four texts by Chinese diasporic women author, the authors or their protagonists describe different explorations of the search for home: a space where they can articulate their voices and desires. The notion of home for these diasporic Chinese women is much more complex than a simple feeling of nostalgia in response to a state of displacement and unhomeliness. The idea of home relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations. Fantasy is seen as a literary mode in the corpus of this study, as described in Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (1981). Literary fantasy offers a way to rework ancient myths, fairytales, ghost stories and legends; it also subverts conventional narrative representation, and challenges the restricting powers of patriarchy and other dominant ideologies. Through a critical reading of four texts written by diasporic Chinese women, namely, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976); Adeline Yen Mah’s Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (1997); Ying Chen’s Ingratitude (1995) and Larissa Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand (1995), this thesis aims to offer critical insights into how these works re-imagine a ‘home’ through literary fantasy which leads beyond the nationalist and Orientalist stereotypes; and how essentialist conceptions of diasporic culture are challenged by global geopolitics and cultural interactions.

Though David Foster Wallace is well known for declaring that “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (Conversations 26), what he actually meant by the term “human being” has been quite forgotten. It is a truism in Wallace studies that Wallace is a posthuman writer whose characters are devoid of any kind of inner interiority or soul. This is a misreading of Wallace’s work. My argument is that Wallace’s work and his characters—though they are much neglected in Wallace studies—are animated by the tension between materialism and essentialism, and this dualism is one of the major ways in which Wallace bridges postmodern fiction with something new. My project is itself part of this post-postmodern turn, a contribution to the emerging field of cognitive literary studies which has tried to move beyond postmodernism by bringing a renewed focus on the sciences of mind to literary criticism. As yet, this field has largely focused on fiction published before the twentieth century. I expand the purview of cognitive literary studies and give a rigorous and necessary account of Wallace’s humanism. In each chapter I discuss a particular concern that Wallace shares with his predecessors (authorship; selfhood; therapy; free will), and explore how Wallace’s dualism informs his departure from postmodernism. I begin by setting out the key scientific sources for Wallace, and the embodied model of mind that was foundational to his writing and his understanding, especially after Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” of the writing process. In chapter 2, I unravel the unexamined but hugely significant influence of René Descartes on Wallace’s ghost stories, showing that Wallace’s work is not as posthuman as it is supposed to be. In chapter 3, I discuss the dualist metaphors that Wallace consistently uses to describe an individual’s experience of sickness. Focusing on the interior lives of both therapist and patient in Wallace’s work, I show that Wallace’s therapy fictions are a critical response to postmodern anti-psychiatry. Finally, in chapter 4, I reconcile Wallace’s dualist account of material body and essential mind by setting his work against both the history of the philosophy of free will and postmodern paranoid fiction. If Wallace’s fiction is about what it is to be a human being, this thesis is about the human ‘I’ at the heart of Wallace’s work.

This thesis is an exploration of reading styles and stylistic patterning in relation to dystopian fiction. Situated within an empirical cognitive poetics, the study draws upon naturalistic reader-response data, with specific reference to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’, as case studies of dystopian texts that produce a spectrum of readings. The notions of preferred and dispreferred responses are defined in cognitive linguistic and pragmatic terms, and non-normative readings of these dystopian texts are investigated. The thesis adopts a text-world theoretical description, and provides both naturalistic reader-community data as well as focused interviews and reading protocols. It was found that some readers insist on producing dispreferred readings even in the face of lack of textually-driven evidence. Such readers allow their own emotions, outlooks and dispositions to over-ride the textual patterning, in producing dispreferred and non-evidential readings. These readings are nevertheless genuinely held. This study raises questions for all text-driven models of literary reading and analysis.

This thesis addresses the ideological underpinnings in the migration narratives of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), Bharati Mukhejree’s Jasmine (1989) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) in order to reveal how certain meanings become more legitimate than others. In my discussion I expose the ways a narrative can be shaped and aligned such that it appears to provide agency for the migrant character, particularly in respect to inviting the notion of desire, feminist discourses, human rights, alienation, yet fails to challenge the structure of the dominant culture. To sum my argument up, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Jasmine, and Brick Lane do indeed engage with the dominant discourses of migration, yet they are infested with ideological contradictions and political absences. Though empowering the migrant figure, such as Nafisi, Jyoti and Nazneen, is laudable, the authors’ narratives nevertheless grant the migrant the power of assimilation within the standards of the Western dominant culture without communicating the process of negotiating an identity between native and host cultures. These texts suggest that the failure of assimilation is a character flaw and represent “Third World” and “First World” cultures in a series of false dichotomies.

In this thesis I engage with the subject of identity and how it is formed and undermined in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In many of the novels and short stories a tension exists between two opposing forces. The first is the pursuit of a social identity which values inherited wealth and familial connections, mirroring in the values of the Old European World. In opposition to this is the protagonists’ personal identity that is not dependent on these long established connections to others. In characters such as Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver the latter is sacrificed in order to pursue the former. However, such an act of self-betrayal is shown to have significant, indeed disastrous consequences resulting in alcoholism, narcissism and melancholia. Alongside this study of Fitzgerald’s male characters is a consideration of women in his work and the manner in which they are used as symbols of masculine success. I chart the development of these female characters from his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in which women are primarily used to demonstrate the fears, desire and indeed character of the protagonist to more complex representations in the mature novels The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. In Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan demonstrates a growing awareness of the female voice, even as, at times, Nick Carraway’s narration attempts to suppress it. In Tender is the Night, I suggest that there are two distinct stories evident in one narrative. In this novel “her” story is as significant as “his” story. I argue that this dialogism is, in part, a product of the author’s biography at the time of the novel’s composition. The depiction of these masculine acts of self-betrayal result in locating the most important aspects of identity in work. Or, as Fitzgerald wrote in 1936, “I have at last become a writer only.”

This thesis seeks to destabilize many of the hierarchical boundaries established by the recent critical projects surrounding “female modernism” and “middlebrow” fiction by highlighting two authors, Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman, who have been neglected precisely because their works challenge the boundaries of these literary classifications. The thesis suggests that White’s and Coleman’s texts seemingly defy this categorization specifically through the portrayal of psychosis, the threat and experience of which permeates their texts and the way in which this impacts the construction of female subjectivity. “Female modernism”, “middlebrow” fiction, and “fictions of madness” often appear to be at odds with one another, but a close examination of White’s and Coleman’s texts suggests that these boundaries are not impermeable. Chapters One and Two seek to contextualize White’s and Coleman’s texts within these critical arguments and gesture towards the following chapters which demonstrate the extent to which these texts are specifically concerned with testing and exploring boundaries in the formation of female subjectivity, specifically through the experience of psychosis. It is their alternating acceptance of and challenge to these boundaries which contributes to the mis-placement of their texts within literary classifications. Chapters Three, Four, and Five explore the fortification and dissolving of the boundaries of female subjectivities as represented in White’s and Coleman’s texts. Chapter Three examines the relationship between mother and daughter in the texts specifically through the process of maternity. It argues that the process of maternity challenges female subjectivity in such a way that is best understood if it is contextualized within Julia Kristeva’s conception of the abject. Chapter Four addresses the textual representation of psychosis as a dissolution of subjectivity which is analysed using the theories of Luce Irigaray. Chapter Five acts as a counter-balance to this by exploring the ways in which female subjectivity is positively constructed in the texts, specifically through the presentation of Catholicism. In combination, each of these thematic elements which explore and test various boundaries result in a body of texts which defy the boundaries of “female modernism”, the “middlebrow”, and “fictions of madness”. The thesis concludes by suggesting that it is those texts which were written in the 1950s and therefore contain elements which are characteristic of the culture of that decade which present the greatest problem for the categorization of these texts. It suggests that the literature of this decade, particularly literature written by women, deserves greater consideration to separate it more fully from the existing literary classifications which struggle to contain it.

This thesis demonstrates how selected texts by J.G. Ballard—Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High‐Rise 1975)—and Kurt Vonnegut—Player Piano (1952), Slaughterhouse‐Five(1969) and Galápagos (1985)—can be considered in terms of theoretical stances derived from posthumanism. By analysing representations of the ‘human’ in relation to both the ‘machine’ and the ‘evolutionary human animal’, this thesis illustrates the emergence of the posthuman subject. In addition, by recognising the intersection between posthumanism and evolutionary theory, a wider project of this thesis involves demonstrating how the use of various theoretical approaches, from the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’, contributes to the formation of a ‘posthumanities’ approach to literature. J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut consistently present fictional scenarios in which the lines between ‘human’, ‘machine’ and ‘evolutionary animal’ are disrupted and blurred. Depictions assume various triangulations and configurations: from the protagonist Ballard’s auto‐eroticism, to the characters of High‐Rise conflating boundaries between the ‘human’ and the evolutionary animal that is conveyed as a constituent of human identity, as well as between the machinic environment and the human inhabitant. Further,comparable configurations characterise Vonnegut’s texts: Player Piano’s Paul Proteus’ war against the machine is superimposed by human affiliation with the machine, and the castaway characters of Galápagos are stranded by evolutionary forces that displace human authority and control to the uttermost limit. Each of these instances contributes to the effective intervention of posthumanist thinking when reading the texts. In addition, the utilisation of evolutionary concepts derived from contemporaneous publications circulating in the cultural and scientific sphere highlights the usefulness of acknowledging sources from beyond the remit of traditional literary studies’ methodologies when reading texts. The triangulation between literature, posthumanism and evolutionary theory results in a reconfigured methodological approach to fictional texts: the posthumanities.

To our best knowledge this is the first attempt to investigate translation of the stylistic features involved in an interesting masterpiece of American literature, The Old Man and the Sea, written by Ernest Hemingway. This story has been translated into Arabic twice, first by Munir Ba'labaki and second by Dr Ziad Zakariyya. This thesis attempts to explore problems of literary translation from English into Arabic. It seeks to investigate some aspects of culture and style in The Old Man and the Sea and the two Arabic translations. The aim is to assess how much of the style and culture of the original has been preserved. It is also concerned with the problem of equivalence and translation units, since equivalence is considered the tool for detailed comparison. Chapter One deals with various approaches to evaluation of translation. This is done by reviewing a number of notions which have dominated the field of translation for a long time. One school believes that the act of translation is an art and that evaluation is limited to the aesthetic values of a literary work and depends largely on the critic's subjective decisions. Its objective is to provide a list of rules for the translator to follow in order to arrive at a translation of optimal value. The other school approaches translation as a linguistic operation and considers that a translation should be judged objectively, according to a linguistic analysis based on equivalence of the ST and the TT. Proponents of this view have developed models for evaluating. These models are addressed. Chapter Two is concerned with a review of certain concepts which are fundamental to literary translation. It attempts to highlight the theoretical approaches to the notion of 'equivalence', such as formal vs. dynamic and semantic vs. communicative equivalence, and different approaches to the question of translation units.

In this thesis I examine the ways in which feminist and human geographies intersect with contemporary women-centred fantasy fiction. In particular, I consider space and place to be significant to female characters in their role as a physical presence as well as an intangible location. Thus I explore the forest, the body and the mind as territories occupied by the supernatural women. These various spatial themes, I suggest, outline distinctive locations for supernatural female characters and enable them to engage in a position of resistance from patriarchal ideologies. Through a spatial analysis of selected fiction, I reflect on challenges to notions that construct identity, gender and sexuality as well as conflict among women. I argue that the supernatural woman in fiction has been frozen in one-dimensional representation within traditional male-centred texts. This one-dimensionally, I suggest, hinges on the juxtaposition of the overly simplistic good/bad binary that has often illustrated female characters within fantasy fiction. As fantasy is a genre typically more concerned with worlds than characters, the women-centred fantasy text is unique in its exploration and pursuit of the literary character. Given the contemporary and interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, I have drawn upon filmic adaptations of texts at times to illustrate a further level of cultural awareness. The main emphasis is, however, on literary texts and, thus, reference to film is meant to supplement my textual analysis.

This thesis explores the relationships between science fiction, social theory and social transformation through an in-depth analysis of three feminist science fiction novels. It develops innovative reading practices that bring together narrative theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines, including Sociology, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies. With reference to feminist psychoanalytic theory, the thesis also develops an original theorisation of the 'utopian impulse' and the workings of passionate identification in the formation of interpretive communities, with particular reference to feminist, social theoretical, and science fiction (fan) communities. The three novels focused on — The Gate to Women's Country, Body of Glass and The Fifth Sacred Thing — were selected because they crystallise an extensive range of debates conducted in a period of productive crisis for feminist theory and praxis from the mid 1980s through the mid 1990s. The thesis conducts an in-depth analysis of the transformations in social relations, including intimate social relations, that the novels theorise are necessary for the re-visioning of feminist futures. These include issues surrounding Sex, Gender and Sexuality; Mothering and Fatherhood; the relationship between investments in Spirituality, Technology and Hope for the Future. These debates are all set in the larger context of the historical (and epistemological) rupture between Modern and Post-Modern thought caused by the traumatic events of the Holocaust. The thesis argues that the heteroglossic genre possibilities of science fiction enable the novel texts to embody diverse strands of contestatory feminist theorising. They can thus hold open debates that might be foreclosed in more academic genres of theory that prefer texts to embody a single coherent authorial voice. Throughout the thesis I argue that this is a particularly timely moment to examine such questions, when feminist theory in the academy is apparently dominated by post-structuralist theory, and other feminist theories, namely those clustered around radical feminism, have been and continue to be abjected. I argue that feminist hope for the future requires that no feminist theories should simply be rejected, but that they require conscientious re-readings. Feminists, I argue, must take account of their passionate longings for inclusion in feminist interpretive communities as well as the pain caused when feminist theories exclude their subjective experience and / or alternative theories. The reading practices that can be developed when reading feminist science fiction can facilitate such a process.