This thesis aims to broaden the scope of magical realism by examining contemporary fiction in Asia and Australasia, regions which have been largely neglected in critical discussion of the narrative mode. My research seeks to modify and expand our collective conception of magical realism through key texts that challenge not only how we read the narrative mode, but also our expectations of it. My analysis involves a dual intervention in the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I supplement existing scholarship of magical realism with new paradigms of critical thought, such as epistemology, mythopoeia, ecocriticism, intertextuality and discourse on human rights. Each of the key authors - Indigenous Australian Alexis Wright, New Zealand Maoris Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera, Indian-born cosmopolitans Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, and Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan - subjects the narrative mode to differing intellectual, socio-cultural and historical frameworks, and in the process reinvents magical realism to serve their own artistic purposes. The authors' key texts demonstrate the need to recalibrate theory on magical realism in contexts such as Alexis Wright's depiction of ongoing colonisation of Australia's first inhabitants in a supposedly postcolonial country, and Mo Yan's critique of post-communist China. I argue that magical realism has porous borders, not only geographically and culturally, but also in the sense that the narrative mode frequently spills over into other, different generic kinds such that the distinctions between them are often blurred. In addition, magical realism's constant state of transformation makes it particularly difficult to define. Therefore, I propose a minimalist definition of the narrative mode and a flexible approach. However, underlying cultural elements and individual artistic expression in a text may sometimes limit magical realism's utility as a tool for literary analysis. Finally, I explore the notion of a genealogy of magical realism based on polygenesis, emerging in different cultures at different times.

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the uses of tropes of marginality in American, Caribbean, British, and African fiction that engages with the aftermaths of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery. This study begins by exploring the utility of the frame of Paul Gilroy's concept of the "black Atlantic" as a heuristic model for understanding encounters with slavery and the slave trade as phases of an emerging capitalist modernity. I suggest that, within this heuristic framework, marginality is always variable, contingent and changing. Several positions of marginality might even emerge in conflict with each other, since the ideological deployments of slavery in the U.S., the Caribbean, and in African countries are not always in concert. In fact, it is through the study of conflicts and tensions between such seemingly unified marginalities that their differences become discernible. As a result, the common theme in the texts I examine is the need to create communities of listeners who can discern the transformations of the colonising moment in the disparate sites of the diaspora. The practice of listening is a step in apprehending the forms of marginalisation and occlusions of the violence of colonisation that continue at different sites. In the five chapters of this dissertation, I read stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, and novels by Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Maryse Conde, Joseph Conrad, Ayi Kwei Armah, Amos Tutuola, Yaw Boateng, and Syl Cheney- Coker. I focus, particularly, on the use of animals, spatial boundaries, literacy, orality, and tropes of listening in the selected texts. I show that these authors use the opposition of visual and aural metaphors to draw attention to the limits of their characters' knowledge in order to highlight the situatedness of each character in processes of marginalisation that continue to unfold. Further, as much as these narratives excavate the afterlives of slavery, they are also engaged in the task of differentiating them in order to identify the necessary site-specific tasks of reparation or repair. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis engages with Wilson Harris's vision for the Caribbean in light of the processes of land settlement, appropriation, genocide and slave trafficking that have historically denied the region's population of human identity. Concerned primarily with Wilson Harris's first four published novels, Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963), which were then grouped together and republished as The Guyana Quartet (1985), the study of this quartet also focuses on Harris's critical essays, most notably "The Amerindian Legacy" (1990). Firstly, this thesis situates Wilson Harris within the context of postcolonial thought and Caribbean literature in the 20th century. Then, it focuses on the remnants of colonial conquest that appear continuously in Harris's four novels under the repeated motif of pursuit. By exploring the presence of Jungian thought in Harris's fictional writing and critical writing, as well as the immanent ontology of the Caribbean that underpins the author's vision, the thesis draws out Harris's response to the cycle of persecution that he believes to stagnate the Caribbean. Harris's mythopoetic revisioning of Caribbean identity in The Guyana Quartet proposes a form of rebirth that transforms the dialectic between...

published_or_final_version / abstract / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

In this dissertation the author argued for a postcolonial reading of the sublime that takes into account the racial and gendered underpinnings of Immanuel Kant's and Edmund Burke's classic theories. The thesis used the understanding of the sublime as a lens for an analysis of the cultural politics of landscape in a range of late imperial and early modern texts about Africa. A re-reading of Henry Morton Stanley's central African exploration narratives, John Buchan's African fiction and political writing, and later texts such as Alan Paton's fiction, autobiographies and travel writing, together with an analysis of colonial mountaineering discourse, suggest that non-metropolitan discourses of the sublime, far from being an outmoded rhetoric, could manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested colonial landscapes.

In this dissertation the author argued for a postcolonial reading of the sublime that takes into account the racial and gendered underpinnings of Immanuel Kant's and Edmund Burke's classic theories. The thesis used the understanding of the sublime as a lens for an analysis of the cultural politics of landscape in a range of late imperial and early modern texts about Africa. A re-reading of Henry Morton Stanley's central African exploration narratives, John Buchan's African fiction and political writing, and later texts such as Alan Paton's fiction, autobiographies and travel writing, together with an analysis of colonial mountaineering discourse, suggest that non-metropolitan discourses of the sublime, far from being an outmoded rhetoric, could manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested colonial landscapes.

Thesis (PhD--English)--University of Auckland, 2009. / "Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Doctor of Philosophy in English, the University of Auckland, 2009." Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is a literary analysis of two novels, Comme le bon pain (2001) by Mariama Ndoye and Cendres et braises (1994) by Ken Bugul. It examines the representation of Islam in relation to African women's identity, with particular emphasis on its relationship with the postcolonial context of francophone West Africa. Chapter I reviews the emergence of African francophone literature by women authors and the trends of criticism that developed as a result of it. It also presents the theoretical framework of this research, namely feminist and postcolonial theories inspired by Frantz Fanon and African women theorists. Chapter II of this thesis explores the use of Sufi imagery in Cendres et braises and its metaphorical description of decolonization and of the postcolonial subject. Chapter III examines Comme le bon pain for Islamic elements and their interaction with African traditional beliefs, as it attempts to understand Ndoye's own attitude towards Islam. It briefly reviews definitions of syncretism and what was termed "African Islam." Chapter IV poses the question of whether the two novels can be inscribed within a feminist ideology, specifically in a postcolonial, West African and Muslim context.

This project explores the ways in which several Welsh writers, and English writers of Welsh descent, respond to and reconstruct the related notions of Britishness and Welshness during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Saunders Lewis, David Jones, and Kate Roberts each reveal nuances in perspective during this period in which the British Empire reached its peak and required popular justification for doing so. Each author also participates in a form of Modernism, whether mainstream or specific to literary trends in Wales; in each case, such Modernisms are defined by an embracing of Welshness as an alternative to Anglocentric modernity. Through employing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity as it relates to ethnicity, this project contribute to the fields of Postcolonial Theory and Welsh Studies through evaluating how these authors construct and perform identity markers in the late 19th and 20th centuries for political purposes. Applying these critical paradigms to the four authors shows how constructions of ethnic identity serve political ends – particularly in relation to how collective national identity responds, whether through resistance, participation or some combination of the two, to the broader aims of the British Empire. / Department of English

In this dissertation the author argued for a postcolonial reading of the sublime that takes into account the racial and gendered underpinnings of Immanuel Kant's and Edmund Burke's classic theories. The thesis used the understanding of the sublime as a lens for an analysis of the cultural politics of landscape in a range of late imperial and early modern texts about Africa. A re-reading of Henry Morton Stanley's central African exploration narratives, John Buchan's African fiction and political writing, and later texts such as Alan Paton's fiction, autobiographies and travel writing, together with an analysis of colonial mountaineering discourse, suggest that non-metropolitan discourses of the sublime, far from being an outmoded rhetoric, could manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested colonial landscapes.