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This dissertation is a qualitative study examining the behavior of the main characters in the novels in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga as those behaviors compare to behavior listed in warnings about partner violence. The study found specific behaviors of those fictional characters matching those recognized as behaviors of partner violence in all four novels in the series, including behaviors that are illegal. The commercial success and popularity of the novels, aimed at the young adult reader market, suggests broad social acceptance of the characters’ behaviors in romantic pursuit. Despite over 30 years of anti-violence work, this research suggests that behaviors are socially well accepted as both indicators of romantic attachment and of partner violence, depending on context rather than behavior. The study demonstrates the fluidity of how behaviors are defined as partner violence, or not. These findings also suggest strategies for social work education, practice and research. / text

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PhD - Arts / The emergence of HIV/AIDS has changed how society perceives and deals with issues of sex, sexuality, and gender. The writers studied in this thesis raise important questions pertaining to HIV/AIDS and gender, love, romance, sex and sexuality in present day Kenya. Their writing demonstrates that HIV/AIDS has changed the ways in which people understand these issues. This thesis sought to explore, through an analysis of fiction, how human social behaviour has been affected by a pandemic disease. The changes in sexual and gender relationships that are reflected in this literature points at “emergent cultures of sexuality”. For instance, the literature clearly shows that both men and women in contemporary Kenya are confronted by an urgent need to change their sexual behaviour whether in monogamous or polygamous relationships, hence a change in the power matrix between men and women. Practices to do with pleasure seeking and the satisfaction of desire, male domination of gender relationships, notions of masculinity among other social and cultural practices and beliefs are affected in extreme ways. In some cases, these practices and beliefs are undermined and subverted whilst in other cases they are reinforced. What these social and sexual dynamics suggest is that human society is being revolutionized by the HIV/AIDS phenomenon. Therefore, this study looks at how popular discourses about sexuality, romance and gender have been (re)appropriated and (re)articulated by popular literature in Kenya within the context of HIV/AIDS. The thesis examines how discourses on romance are employed to re-imagine social and sexual behaviour as a means to control and contain the spread of HIV/AIDS. My analysis demonstrates that popular fiction is capable of representing the hidden realities of sex, sexuality, romance and gender that individuals face daily in a way that other forms of expression and media cannot. The examples of HIV/AIDS fiction examined here give readers a better understanding of the effects of the disease on society through the various stories that different characters in the novels tell. These stories also play an important role in the creation of urgently needed and socially relevant meaning with regard to HIV/AIDS. The popular text, in the context of HIV/AIDS, makes an important contribution to cultural production because it comments on and more importantly, offers possibilities of re-imagining and re-creating new forms and practices of social and sexual behaviour in present-day Kenyan society.

Margaret Atwood's early fiction provides a valuable insight into issues surrounding the establishment of the women's health movement. From The Edible Woman in 1969 to The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, Atwood's work takes up key issues of the movement during this time. Her fiction explores a number of women's health topics including contraception, abortion, birthing, assisted reproductive technologies, eating disorders and breast cancer. Atwood's interest in the appearance of victims in Canadian literature, however, leads to a rejection of the notion that women are fated victims of patriarchal institutions like medicine. This thesis argues that while she does not deny women can be victims, she refuses to accept that this role is inevitable. Foucault's later constructions of power and resistance are explored with the female protagonists refusing to believe their situations are inescapable. Atwood's recognition of her role as a popular fiction writer and her refusal to wear the 'feminist' label allow her the space to critique the women's health movement. Her early fiction exposes the absolutism of the movement and demonstrates its limitations in accounting for women's diversity.

My research is a literary study which primarily examines previously unstudied best-selling action-thriller fiction primary material from the US, Britain and Russia (published in the decade following the 11 September 2001 attacks) in the contexts of hegemonic masculinity and Self and Other stereotyping. I analyse thirteen works by the following popular fiction authors: Vince Flynn, Daniel Silva, Nelson DeMille, Frederick Forsyth and Danil Koretskiy. Drawing on masculinity studies and archetypal psychology, I formulate the model of the archetypal hero – a character type which the above authors‘ works capitalise on. I trace the employment of this model in these primary works within the framework of constructing a positive and heroic image of the Self, of which the action-thriller hero is the chief representative. The archetypal hero‘s principal traits include courage, honour, individualism and just violence among others. Heroes such as Mitch Rapp, Gabriel Allon, John Corey, Mike Martin, Max Kardanov and Alexei Mal‘tsev embody this archetypal model and confirm it as positive and dominant in their respective narratives. The authors also utilise a variety of framing strategies to enhance their heroes‘ authoritativeness and characterisation. Among these strategies, the use of historical facts and figures to anchor the narrative, enemy acknowledgement of the hero‘s qualities and female characters‘ fulfilment of traditional gender roles are the most prominent. First-person narration also plays a role in enhancing authenticity, such as in DeMille‘s novels. While the heroes and the side they represent are characterised as inherently positive and superior, their terrorist antagonists fulfil the role of the essentialised and diametrically opposite Other. I demonstrate through further analysis how these characters are positioned as archetypal terrorists, embodying traits which are antithetical to the hero‘s: backwardness; hatred of modernity and ‗civilisation‘; religion (Islam) as their source of hatred; desire for arbitrary revenge and unjustified violence; hypocrisy and disloyalty. Having analysed the main archetypal heroes and villains in the primary action-thriller works, I proceed to examine two mainstream literary authors: American John Updike and Algerian Francophone Yasmina Khadra. I study those of their novels which foreground terrorist characters instead of archetypal heroes, thus analysing one novel by Updike (Terrorist) and two by Khadra (Les Sirènes de Bagdad and L’Attentat). I find that, despite an increased focus on the character of the budding teenage suicide bomber from New Jersey, Updike‘s characterisation follows a pattern similar to the archetypal terrorist in the action-thriller sources. On the other hand, Khadra achieves a more balanced and complex portrayal, presenting his terrorists as human beings motivated by their various personal, social and political grievances rather than blind religious hatred. In sum, only Khadra‘s narratives transcend stereotypical views of terrorism, while the other post-9/11 primary works (including Updike) focus on perpetuating binary oppositions of the Self and Other, masculinity and emasculation. My original contribution to knowledge is the identification, definition and comparative textual analysis of archetypal hero and terrorist characters in post-9/11 action-thriller and mainstream fiction in three languages (English, Russian and French) within a framework combining several elements: aspects of the system of representation of the terrorist Other, masculinity studies and archetypal psychology as well as the context of political and media post-9/11 views of Arabs and/or Muslims in the US, Britain and Russia.

Contemporary African American fiction repeatedly explores intimacy. These explorations have been most sustained in black women’s writing. Although female authors share an interest in romantic interactions, their portrayals reveal wide-ranging attitudes about this theme. Some accounts depict intimacy as a barrier to female advancement. In other texts, feminine success hinges on maintaining a committed relationship. These distinct outlooks not only reflect competing gender discourses within late 20th, early 21st century America but also significant developments in black women’s literature. In this dissertation, I analyze how fictional depictions of heterosexual intimacy reveal crucial facts about black women’s writing. I argue that various subgenres captured under the heading, popular black women’s literature, include narratives about male-female relationships that complicate the efforts celebrated as the black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s. By focusing on the span from 1965-2000, I suggest that at the same moment when Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor were expressing post-civil rights era black femininity in fictions filled with deteriorating heterosexual intimacy, other black women writers were using popular fiction to expose different possibilities for male-female interconnection. These authors exist in the same socio-cultural milieu as their high modernist peers; however, their writings reflect different reactions to decisions about where intimacy fits in the construction of black identity. My dissertation contains four chapters, and each chapter engages roughly a decade and considers different dimensions of black female popular literature. Looking at the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s roots of this genre’s interest in intimacy, chapter one establishes Toni Cade Bambara as a founding figure. Chapter two studies the black romance novel from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s concentrating on pioneers, Rosalind Welles and Sandra Kitt. Dealing with Terry McMillan’s rise to fame between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, chapter three examines chick lit, the site where capitalist feminism and black relationship concerns converge. The final chapter uses Terri Woods’ work to interpret ghetto fiction of the late-1990s. Popular black women’s literature notes the dynamic nature of black cultural identity and responds to that dynamism with portraits of intimacy that register shifting intra-racial realities within the broader context of evolutions in inter-racial democracy. By identifying intimacy as a telling theme in post-civil rights era experience, my research points out the variegated textures of black civic exertion in both literary and political terms.

This thesis argues that the espionage fiction of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré published between 1945 and 1979 illustrates a number of discontinuities, disjunctions and paradoxes related to space, sovereignty and national identity in post-war Britain. To this effect, the thesis has three broad aims. Firstly, to approach the representations of space and sovereign power in the work of these authors published during the period 1945-1979, examining the way in which sovereign power produces space, and then how that power is distributed and maintained. Secondly, to analyse the effect that sovereign power has on a variety of social and cultural environments represented within spy fiction and how the exercise of power affects the response of individuals within them. Thirdly, to establish how the intervention of sovereign power within environments relates to the creation, propagation and exclusion of national identities within each author’s work. By mapping the application of sovereign power throughout various environments, the thesis demonstrates that the control of environment is inextricably linked to the sovereign control of British subjects in espionage fiction. Moreover, the role of the spy in the application of sovereign power reveals a paradox integral to the espionage genre, namely that the maintenance of sovereign power exists only through the undermining of its core principles. Sovereignty, in these texts, is maintained only by weakening the sovereign control of other nations.

Les œuvres de Neil Gaiman sont souvent qualifiées de postmodernes dans la mesure où elles lient expérimentation et autoréflexivité à une démarche de fiction populaire qui leur paraît antagoniste. A l’inverse d'une œuvre postmoderniste typique, qui met en avant sa mise à nu des mécanismes fabulateurs, les métafictions et les parodies gaimaniennes restent des fictions fantastiques et merveilleuses où les enjeux fabulateurs (psychologie et parcours des personnages, intrigue, émotion et suspens) gardent leur place primordiale. Elles ne sont donc pas des œuvres expérimentales mêlées d'éléments de fiction populaire, mais des œuvres de fiction populaire autoréflexive. Cette posture singulière fait de ces œuvres un terrain d'exploration fertile pour la réflexion sur les spécificités de la fiction populaire, et sur la place privilégiée qu'y occupe la fabulation ("storytelling"), notion qu’Henri Bergson ou Frank McConnell considéraient comme le fil rouge entre l’écriture de fiction d’aujourd'hui et la mythopoèse religieuse d’autrefois. Cette dialectique instaurée entre fabulation, mythe et fiction populaire constitue le cœur thématique des œuvres de Gaiman, qui abondent en réécritures de mythes anciens, modernes, religieux, populaires, et en représentations de personnages d’écrivains et de conteurs traditionnels, ou de personae gaimaniennes, qui, au plus fort de l’intrigue comme aux confins du paratexte, au détour d’une préface ou d’une vignette de bande dessinée, forgent une représentation de la fiction comme mythe, de l’écrivain comme figure mythique du conteur, et de la fabulation comme activité humaine quintessentielle. / Neil Gaiman’s fantasy works are often deemed postmodernist since they experiment with self-reflexivity and mix it with a supposedly antagonistic impulse towards popular fiction. Typical postmodernist works mostly emphasize their attacks against the fictional illusions of referentiality, character or plot. On the contrary, Gaiman’s works unapologetically remain within the bounds of fantasy, a genre in which imagination and storytelling are paramount–along with their related issues: characterization, plot, emotion and suspense. Thus, Gaiman’s fiction is not experimental fiction enhanced with elements of popular fiction, but actual popular fiction made self-reflexive. Thanks to that peculiar mood, studying Gaiman’s work is a very fruitful means of investigating the distinctive features of popular fiction, and its inherent emphasis on storytelling–or, as Henri Bergson called it, “fabulation.” Both Bergson and Frank McConnell focused on this notion which they saw as the essential link between ancient mythmaking and today’s fiction writing. Gaiman’s fiction mostly relies on such a dialectics between myth, popular fiction and storytelling or fabulation. His fantasy stories constantly rewrite ancient, religious myths, modern myths or the “myths” of popular fiction, and feature many fictional and historical writers, traditional storytellers, or Gaiman’s own personae, so that in paratext as well as in the heart of a narrative, in the quiet and supposedly reliable words of an introduction as surely as on the most striking comics panels, fiction is portrayed as myth, writers as mythical avatars of some archetypal storyteller, and storytelling as the one, quintessential human act.

The annual science fiction anthology series The Best Japanese SF started publication in 2009 and showcases domestic writers old and new and from a wide range of publishing backgrounds. Although representative of the second golden era of Japanese science fiction in print in its diversity and with an emphasis on that year in science fiction, as the volumes progress the editors’ unspoken agenda has become more pronounced, which is to create a set of expectations for the genre and to uphold writers Project Itoh and EnJoe Toh as exemplary of this current golden era. This thesis analyzes the context of the anthology series’ publication, how the anthology is constructed, and these two writers’ contributions to the genre as integral to the anthologies and important to the younger generation of writers in the genre.