This thesis provides the first full-length account of the political and cultural significance of the accession of Queen Anne. It offers a critical reassessment of the politics of the royal image across a spectrum of texts, events, and artefacts - from panegyrics, newspapers, sermons, royal progresses, and processions to medals, coins, and playing cards. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of party politics to the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century. This thesis nuances that assumption by arguing: (1) that the principal focus of partisan texts was competing representations of monarchy; and (2) that the explosion of partisanship at the start of the eighteenth century was triggered by unrest about the royal succession. Anne was the last protestant Stuart. She had no surviving children. This thesis explores how authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and a great many lesser known and anonymous writers and propagandists conceptualized the end of the Stuart dynasty. Anne's accession forced writers to conjecture on the future succession. There were two rival claimants to the throne after Anne's death: the protestant Electress Sophia of Hanover and Anne's Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward. Sophia's claim was statutory, James's hereditary. Factions emerged in support of both claimants. Almost all topical writing took a stance on the issue. Many sided with the government, supporting Hanover. Yet some writers favoured the illegal but hereditary claim of James Francis Edward; they had to express support in covert ways. This succession crisis triggered not only printed polemic, but also swathes of clandestine manuscript literature circulating in the Jacobite underground. The government took a hard line on Jacobite writers and printers; this thesis documents both their persecution and the techniques they used to evade the law. The thesis concludes by suggesting that this oppositional literary culture only disintegrated after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, and the consequent settlement of the Hanoverian succession, in late 1716. After this point, royal succession ceased to be a major source of political discontent.

This thesis examines works written about imprisonment by four South African political prison writers who were incarcerated for political reasons. My Introduction focuses on current research and literature available on the subject of political prison-writing and it justifies the study to be undertaken. Chapter One examines the National Party's policy pertaining to the holding of political prisoners and discusses the work of Michel Foucault on the subject of imprisonment as well as the connection he makes between knowledge and power. This chapter also considers the factors that motivate a prisoner to write. Bearing in mind Foucault's findings, Chapters Two to Five undertake detailed studies of La Guma's The Stone Country, Dennis Brutus's Letters to Martha, Hugh Lewin's Bandiet and Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, respectively. Particular emphasis is placed on the reaction of these writers against a repressive government. In addition, Chapters Two to Five reflect on the way in which imprisonment affected them from a psychological point of view, and on the manner in which they were, paradoxically, empowered by their prison experience. Chapters Four and Five also consider capital punishment and Lewin and Breytenbach's response to living in a hanging jail. I contemplate briefly the works of Frantz Fanon in the conclusion in order to elaborate on the reasons for the failure of the system of apartheid and the policy of political imprisonment and to reinforce my argument. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This study traces the current status of Spanish ethics as seen through the optics of historical memory. Starting from the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the thesis relates contemporary themes to their proposed origin throughout three additional distinctive eras of the 20th and 21st century in Spain: 1982-1996 (Socialist Spain), 1997-2010 (Post-modern Spain), and 2011-present (current Spain). Spanish narratives ranging from Los Abel by Matute, La magnitud de la tragedia by Monzó, "Fidelidad" of Ha dejado de llover by Barba and Las fosas de Franco by Silva are contextualized through their ethical architecture, in accordance with their socio-political context, and relationship to past historical traumas. This work proposes that the themes of anticlericalism, the pursuit of social equality, anti bureaucracy, and political distrust are trends culminating from Kohlberg's third level of morality. The thesis aims to be an exposition and legitimization of different ethical schemas that might otherwise be polarized as wrong and inferior by others.

The study discusses selected Shona novels‟ depiction of the theme of protest in the post-independence era in Zimbabwe. The ideas that these novels generate on protest are examined in the context of socio-political and socio-cultural issues in post-independent Zimbabwe. The study is an investigation of the extent to which protest literature is indispensable in the struggle of African people to liberate themselves from imperialist servitude. Novels on socio-political protest show how the government has failed to deliver on most of its promises because of neocolonialism and corruption. Novels on socio-cultural protest show how cultural innovations in post-independence Zimbabwe brought problems .The study comes to the conclusion that for literature to be reliable and useful to society it is not enough to highlight weaknesses in criticizing, but it should go beyond that and offer constructive and corrective criticism. This shows that protest literature is a vital tool for social transformation in Zimbabwe. / African languages / M.A. (African languages)

Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, ecocriticism and political theory, Active Enchantments explores a strain of thought within American literature that understands life in all of its forms to be generated not by self determined identities, but by interconnectedness and self abandonment. I argue that this interest led American writers across the nineteenth century to develop theories of subjectivity and of politics that not only emphasize the entanglement of the self with its environment, but also view this relationship as structured by self overcoming. Thus, when Emerson calls such interconnectedness "active enchantment," he means to signal life's inherent ability to constantly surpass itself, to never fully be identical with itself. My dissertation brings to the fore the political and ecological stakes of this paradox: if our selves and communities are molded by self abandonment, then the standard scholarly account of how nineteenth century American literature conceptualized politics must be revised. Far from understanding community as an organic production, founded on a teleological and harmonizing principle, the writers I study reconceive it around a sense of a commonality irreducible to fixed identity. The politics emerging out of such redefinition disposes with the primacy of individual or human agency, and becomes ecological in that it renders inoperative the difference between the social and the natural, the human and the non human, ourselves and what comprises us. It is the ecological dimension of what seems like a properly political question that brings together writers as diverse as Emerson and Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Fuller and Henry and William James. I argue, for example, that in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, racial minorities emerge from geological strata as a kind of natural archive that complicates the nation's understanding of its communal origin. When she sets her romances on Native American shell mounds in Maine, or makes the health of a New England community depend on colonial pharmacopoeia and herbalist healing practices of the West Indies, Jewett excavates from history its silent associations and attunes us not only to the violent foundation of every communal identity, but to this identity's entanglement in a number of unacknowledged relations. Her work thus ultimately challenges the procedures of democratic inclusiveness that, however non violent, are nevertheless always organized around a particular notion of identity. The question of the self's constitutive interconnectedness with the world is as central to Margaret Fuller's work. Active Enchantments documents how Fuller's harrowing migraines enabled her to generate a peculiar conception of the "earthly mind," according to which the mind is material and decomposable, rather than spiritual, incorruptible or ideal. This notion eventually led her to devise a theory of the self that absolves persons from self possession and challenges the distinctiveness of personal identity. My concluding chapter argues that Henry James's transnational aesthetics was progressively politicized in the 1880s, and that what scholarship celebrates as the peak of his novelistic method develops, in fact, out of a network of surprising and heretofore unexplored influences, William James's concurrent theories of corporeal emotion, Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism, and Henry James's friendship with Ivan Turgenev, which inflamed James's interest in British politics, the Russo Turkish War, and the Balkan revolutions.

This dissertation attempts to develop a counter—memory, a cognitive strategy that provides an alternative to the most prevalent mode of political action by members of minority or subaltern groups: identity politics. It begins with Teresa de Lauretis’ semiotics of subjectivity, which posits the human subject as a shifting series of positions or habits formed through semiotic and cognitive “mapping” of, and being “mapped” by, its environment. De Lauretis maintains that the subject can transform social reality through an “inventive” mode of mapping. The first chapter of this study is a semiotic analysis of the memory system at work in Nicole Brossard’s Picture Theory. It argues that Brossard’s use of holographic technology is an invention that attempts to alter women’s maps of social reality. Quantum physicist David Bohm has also employed the hologram as a theoretical model. By merging Brossard’s holographic memory with Bohm’s theory of a “holomovement,” this study develops an epistemological strategy that alters not only the map of reality, but also the dominant representational mode of cognitive mapping. This enquiry then moves on to other novels written in Canada which have a strong political impetus based on gender, nationality, ethnicity, race and/or class: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone, Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree and Régine Robin’s La Ouébécoite. Through textual analysis, it attempts to establish that although these novels make no mention of holography, each of them employs a memory system that inscribes itself holographically. That holographic memory provides an alternative political strategy to the “identity politics” at work in each of these texts. Each text, in turn, like a fragment of a hologram, adds another structural and political dimension to the hologram. The processual structure of the holographic theory provides a ground for alliances between different political agendas while resisting closure. As an epistemological strategy, it promises to alter both the method and the ground of knowledge.

Writers of fiction have long since relied on love, romance, and desire to drive the plots of their work, yet some postcolonial authors use romance and interpersonal relationships to illustrate the larger political and social forces that affect their relatively marginalized experiences in a global context. To illustrate this literary strategy, I have chosen to discuss four novels written in the twenty-first century by Pakistani authors: Tbe Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan, The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam, and Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie. With the geographical origin of these writers as a common starting place from which to compare and contrast their perspectives on global politics, their understandings of gender, and their perceptions of how the public and the private constitute and intersect each other, I will use postcolonial theory to dissect the treatment of romance in their respective novels. / v, 85 leaves ; 29 cm

Habilitationsschrift--Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, 1980. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-256).

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Title from screen (viewed on June 2, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Karen Kovacik, Jane E. Schultz, Thomas F. Marvin. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61).

Habilitationsschrift--Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, 1980. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-256).