Thesis--Wisconsin. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 42-47).

Zora Neale Hurston's last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, can be read as a sociopolitical critique of what she once referred to as the false foundation of Anglo-Saxon civilization. An overview of the history of race as a concept and the development of racial awareness in the United States provides a background/context for understanding the world Hurston was diagnosing: her analysis implies that the social construction of whiteness contains within its ideology the seeds of its own destruction. Feminist notions of origin, context, and foundation highlight the narcissistic nature of patriarchal social systems that exploit not only the female body but nature as well. In a society that supposedly honors the maternal and praises the beauty of nature, Hurston's novel suggests that both motherhood and nature are exploited by a patriarchal culture focused on competition and material gain. In addition, by highlighting the narcissism of her male protagonist, who presumably represents a socially admired standard of normalcy, she undermines the narrative of superiority that privileges a white patriarchy. / by Rita C. Butler. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2008 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 364-374). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99225

M.A. (English) / This study approaches a much neglected area, not only of English literary research in South Africa generally, but also more specifically of Nadine Gordimer's writing career. Over the last fifty-one years Gordimer has produced approximately 126 short stories. These have variously been taken up in twelve collections, ranging from Face to Face in 1949 to Jump in 1991.However, most of the recognition she has received pertains to her novels which are frequently praised for their historical awareness and their commitment to the disfranchised in South Africa. Yet the short stories are a significant part of Gordimer's output - altogether eight original collections of short stories exist, as compared to ten novels. Nor are the short stories of any less historical significance.Even a cursory glance at the periodization of the stories as reflected in this dissertation unquestionably reveals a developing historical perspective in Gordimer's short fiction. What is most remarkable about this unfolding perspective is Gordimer's ability from time to time in the stories to break out of the limitations imposed on her consciousness by her position in South African society as a white, upper middle-class woman. The most important reason for the dearth of research on the historical consciousness in Gordimer's short fiction seems to be the choice of literary-critical approaches adopted in previous works. Broadly these may be classified as either formalist or new critical. Given the importance to these approaches of the autonomy of the text vis-a-vis the life history of the authoress or the wider socio-political environment within which the work exists, it is not surprising that these works have rather limited their focus to such aspects as theme, structure, short story development and imagery. By examining the interaction of race, gender and class in Gordimer's short stories this dissertation pins its exploration of the developing historical consciousness of these texts not only to specific issues, but to issues with which Gordimer clearly concerns herself. This dissertation therefore asserts that the structures of race, gender and class are indeed pertinently explored in the short stories, not only individually but often with an understanding of their intertwined aspect, and that using this approach a more subtle and appropriate reading of the stories and of their development may emerge.

The view of black Africans that emerges from Renaissance drama is shaped entirely by stereotypes, and is overwhelmingly negative. There is a general reluctance in the scholarly community to challenge the stereotype as a major organising principle in shaping negative images of African dramatic characters. My argument is that the stereotype is a powerful tool in the hands of self-interested parties, and must be recognised as capable of maiming and distorting the experiences of those it sets out to construct, as the one-sided, eurocentric representations of African characters in Renaissance drama reveal. Chapter One reviews the history of European attitudes to black skin colour, focusing briefly on England's public displays of other nations, cultures, and people, on the visual art tradition, and mainly on English Renaissance travel literature which, I believe, was the largest single influence on dramatists' imaginations. The chapter establishes that English anti-black polemics and the stereotyping of black Africans was heightened during the Renaissance, mainly because constructions of otherness were a large part of England's national self-fashioning. Chapter Two explores traditional meanings of blackness as well as the aesthetic and moral aspects of otherness, and attempts to show how the stereotypical assumptions and value judgments encoded in the rhetoric of blackness are allegorically manipulated to suit the needs of Christian England while Africa suffers erasure. Chapters Three and Four foreground the idea that the physical presence of black African characters on the stage becomes a sign of an entire set of actual and imagined differences by which England constructs her view of Africans as prime, visible signifiers of cultural difference. Chapter Four goes a step further and looks at those dramatic texts in which seemingly fixed categories are revealed as unstable, especially when overlaps in race, gender, and social rank come into play. The representation of black African characters on the English Renaissance stage thus reveals a definite correlation between the dominant culture's fears and anxieties over the perceived threat posed by the black African other, its insistence on a self-representation as a distinctly superior culture, and its subsequent and systematic production of Africa and Africans as indelibly other. For the dominant culture to be able to define, produce, and maintain itself as superior, it must, of necessity, strive to keep the other in a position of chronic inferiority, hence the persistent appeal to stereotypes.