Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1990. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [282]-307).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 148 p. : ill. Includes bibliographical references.

Revision of Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 1974. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [111]-114) and index.

Thèse (M.E.L.) -- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2004. / Bibliogr.: f. [92]-93. Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Young adult dystopian fictions follow the patterns established by the classic adult dystopias such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but not completely. Young adult dystopias tend to end happily, a departure from the nightmarish ends of Winston Smith and John Savage. Young adult authors resist hopelessness, even if the fictional world demands it. Using a rhetorical approach established by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep, this thesis traces the reasons for the inclusion of hope and the strategies by which hope is created and maintained. Booth's rhetorical approach recognizes that a narrative is a relational act. At issue in this study is the consideration of what follows from viewing a narrative as a dynamic exchange between text, author and reader. Through a focus on rhetoric as identification, the responsibilities of both the author and the reader to a text are identified and discussed. Three young adult novels, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, The Giver by Lois Lowry and Feed by M.T. Anderson will be analyzed as case studies. Together the analysis of these novels reveals that storytelling is an act of forging identifications and forming alliances. The reader becomes more than just a spectator of the author's rhetoric; the reader is a fully involved member of the interpretive and evaluative process.

In the last two decades, in media and political discourses, Italianness has been increasingly represented as a homogeneous and compact entity, which is intruded on and contaminated by immigrants. In this study, the binary opposition between Italians and migrants is investigated from the perspective of writers who inhabit a liminal space, between at least two cultures, with the main intent to problematize the binary itself and to show its nature of fabrication. On the basis of Said's contrapuntal method, the novels by Ghermandi, Scego, Ali Farah and Lakhous are thought to establish a counterpoint with dominant discourses about Italianness. With the firm belief that discourses about postcolonial Italy must address its colonial past, the works analysed are considered as in dialogue with both colonial and postcolonial discourses. A dialogical relation is established, within the study, between Ghermandi's Regina di fiori e di perle and Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere. Written from the perspectives of the colonized and the colonizers respectively, both novels unveil colonial crimes and faults in Ethiopia, thus being counter-narratives about official representations of Italian colonialism. In Scego's Rhoda and Oltre Babilonia and Ali Farah's Madre piccolo, like threads, the individual stories of Somali exiles intertwine to create a fabric, whose pattern reveals the importance of the legacy of colonialism within contemporary Italy. Mainly situated between Italian and Somali cultures, the protagonists experience traumas, suffering and loss but finally attain a contrapuntal awareness between the two cultural poles. They become conscious of how enriching their in-between position is; they affirm the value of their hybrid identity. With a further zoom into postcolonial Italy, Lakhous' Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio and Divorzio all'islamica a viale Marconi analyse the binary ‘us-Italians' versus ‘thosemigrants' in two microcosms in Rome. General polarizations such as Islam and the West emerge as factors which are exploited in order to exacerbate tensions and divisions. In addition, Italianness appears to be an internally fragmented entity, which is imagined as compact and homogeneous, as a reaction to the influx of immigrants. Against any logic of binarism, the novels by Ghermandi, Scego, Ali Farah and Lakhous reveal the constant effort to create a passage between two poles and to uphold a dialogical relation between them; crossings over and hybridity are continuously affirmed. With their highly important affirmation of multiplicity, the works challenge any essentializing notion of identity and any narrow representation of Italianness, within multiethnic contemporary Italy.