This thesis is a work of creative fiction in the form of a novel.

<p>This dissertation explores the ways in which British popular novels of the eighteenth century functioned as commodities. "Novel Addiction", the title of this dissertation has a double meaning: Addiction was a new conceptual framework developed during the eighteenth century in order to manage the increasing anxiety brought upon the culture of consumption, and the novel, one of the most popular commodities of the same period, was addictive. Both as successful commodities and efficient cultural agents, popular novels that were categorized as the sentimental or the gothic participated in the process of creating and disseminating models of addiction that warranted perpetual discipline. However, this discipline does not aim at preventing or eliminating addiction. It rather manages addiction as "habit" in a way that guarantees proliferation of the market economy. By employing the framework of addiction, I intend to reconfigure the role of the novel in the construction of individual and collective models of consumption-oriented subjectivity. </p><p>The first chapter begins with Eliza Haywood's Present for Women Addicted to Drinking where the author proposes novel-reading as the best cure for alcohol addiction, which allows me to explore a parallel between the phenomenon called the "gin craze" and the proliferation of print commodities. The second and third chapter discuss the sentimental novel and the gothic novel respectively focusing on the characteristics of each genre that make them addictive. The fourth and final chapter discusses Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, which address and attempt to manage "novel addiction," a problem posed by the popular novels of her contemporaries.</p> / Dissertation

Esta dissertação tem como objetivo realizar uma aproximação entre dois campos distintos: a Literatura e as Histórias em Quadrinhos. Especificamente, pretende-se aqui analisar como Watchmen constroi e organiza sua narrativa partindo de um pressuposto realista. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação realiza uma aproximação entre dois gêneros: o romance literário e o romance gráfico (graphic novel). A ascensão de ambos os gêneros já aponta paralelos entre os campos. Após essa exposição, é feita a análise propriamente dita, que compreende duas partes. A primeira se constitui do levantamento das estruturas visuais de Watchmen (balões, formato dos quadrinhos, estilo do desenho) que se organizam em um jogo entre convenção mimética e deslocamento. A segunda parte da análise tem como recorte os capítulos II e XI do romance gráfico e se debruça sobre o tratamento dispensado ao super-heroi; o que significa, no contexto de Watchmen, construir um super-heroi realista. / This thesis aims to approximate two distinctive fields: Literature and Comics. It intends to analyse how Watchmen constructs and organizes its narrative from a realistic assumption. In order to do so, this thesis approximate two genres: the literary novel and the graphic novel. The rise of both genres indicates similarities between the two fields. After that, the two-part analysis is presented. The first part consists of listing and interpreting Watchmens visual structure (speech bubbles, panel format, drawing style) and how they reveal a play between mimetic convention and displacement from it. The second part focuses on Watchmens chapters II and XI and analyses how the super-heroi character is constructed; what does it mean to make a realistic super-hero in Watchmens context.

Esta dissertação tem como objetivo realizar uma aproximação entre dois campos distintos: a Literatura e as Histórias em Quadrinhos. Especificamente, pretende-se aqui analisar como Watchmen constroi e organiza sua narrativa partindo de um pressuposto realista. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação realiza uma aproximação entre dois gêneros: o romance literário e o romance gráfico (graphic novel). A ascensão de ambos os gêneros já aponta paralelos entre os campos. Após essa exposição, é feita a análise propriamente dita, que compreende duas partes. A primeira se constitui do levantamento das estruturas visuais de Watchmen (balões, formato dos quadrinhos, estilo do desenho) que se organizam em um jogo entre convenção mimética e deslocamento. A segunda parte da análise tem como recorte os capítulos II e XI do romance gráfico e se debruça sobre o tratamento dispensado ao super-heroi; o que significa, no contexto de Watchmen, construir um super-heroi realista. / This thesis aims to approximate two distinctive fields: Literature and Comics. It intends to analyse how Watchmen constructs and organizes its narrative from a realistic assumption. In order to do so, this thesis approximate two genres: the literary novel and the graphic novel. The rise of both genres indicates similarities between the two fields. After that, the two-part analysis is presented. The first part consists of listing and interpreting Watchmens visual structure (speech bubbles, panel format, drawing style) and how they reveal a play between mimetic convention and displacement from it. The second part focuses on Watchmens chapters II and XI and analyses how the super-heroi character is constructed; what does it mean to make a realistic super-hero in Watchmens context.

The main objective of this diploma thesis is description of poetics in Václav Řezáč's (1951-1956) novels. It 's especially interested in transformations of poetics between three periods of Řezáč's literary production. Vaclav Řezáč's novels influenced by literary tradition and time period he lived in. That's why we have analyze also novels by other writers. It is believed that Řezáč's evolution was rather cyclical; his novel Nástup in a way refers to some techniques of his previous work Slepá ulička, although with quite different ideological message.

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While literary scholars have written extensively about sensibility in the past two decades, most of the studies have treated either the history of sensibility itself or how it interacted with a particular aspect of English culture and literature, such as sexuality or politics. My project instead examines how a single author, Maria Edgeworth, used sensibility in her writing over the course of her career. I analyze the use of sensibility in three of her novels: Belinda (1801), her first full-length novel; The Absentee (1812), her influential Irish national tale, written at the height of her popularity in the middle years of her career; and Helen (1834), her last novel. This analysis illustrates the changing attitude of both Edgeworth and English society to sensibility and its representations in literature. In Belinda, Edgeworth uses sensibility to demonstrate the virtue and superiority of the characters who possess it, and also to rehabilitate the concept itself. She differentiates between mere affectation and true sensibility by creating both positive and negative examples of sensibility in Belinda – characters clearly possess true sensibility, and those who only pretend to it. In The Absentee, Edgeworth adheres much more closely to the conventions of sentimental fiction than she had in her previous society novels. In my discussion of The Absentee, I demonstrate how Edgeworth uses the conventions of sentiment both to make Irish culture accessible to her English audience and to justify the Irish estate system which put Anglo-Irish landowners in a position of authority over native Irish tenants. My final section focuses on Edgeworth's last novel, Helen, which marks a return to the genre of the society novel with which she began her career. While Edgeworth still uses sensibility as a sign of virtue in Helen, she is also much more interested than previously in the interplay between education and inborn qualities of personality – the very qualities whose existence she was so skeptical of in her education manual, Practical Education, published two years before she began her career as a fiction writer.

1. Sweetness and Light. A novel. Judi lives in a nice, clean house with her seventeen year old stepson, who won’t talk to her in anything but monosyllables. His father, Nelson, and she are struggling to relate to each other, since they fell out over Judi’s continued desire to have a baby, despite many miscarriages. She’s forty-one. Her relationship has lost its spark, she doesn’t know how to talk to the man that she lives with anymore. To make matters worse, he is her boss too. Judi needs answers, what she discovers instead is The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s internationally bestselling guide to shaping the world around you with the power of your mind. Judi soon discovers she’s pretty good at it. Uncanny things start to happen. A wine-do with literary pretentions leads to an unexpectedly spiritual interlude, during which Judi is led, by a cosmic vision, to discover the sinister happenings at her work place. Hope, a schizophrenic woman in their care, has been raped, and is pregnant. Worse, Judi has strong reason to suspect that her abuser is the man she has shared her life with. With The Secret as her moral compass, Judi decides to kidnap Hope and raise the baby as her own. The relationship on the brink, becomes a game of brinkmanship. As Judi struggles to build a dream-life from the wreckage of the old, the burden of past makes its weight felt. A novel of secrets, and The Secret. An exploration of cosmic ordering, and its consequences. 2. Making Light Of The Holocaust: Modelling Calvino’s concept of lightness as an appropriate literary response to the Shoah in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. In Six Memos For The New Millenium, Italo Calvio proposes that lightness is a literary value which can act against cultural and creative paralysis. Given the ongoing cultural obligation to bear witness to the events of The Holocaust, might lightness be a necessary approach to post-holocaust literature? Calvino’s concept of lightness is deconstructed and examined in relation to the Memorial to The Murdered Jews Of Europe. The understandable critical hesitancy surrounding a light approach to the atrocities is examined, with special reference to Benigni’s La vita è bella Finally, taking Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces as an exemplar of the lightness Calvino advocated at work in the field of holocaust literature, the case is made for the appropriateness, and potential necessity, of this approach in works that address The Holocaust, in the specific context of Michaels’ work and more generally.

Alison, the protagonist, is a 21-year-old cello student from Northwest Ohio who studies at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Although she comes from a conservative Methodist upbringing, Alison has turned away from her beliefs and entered into a polyamorous relationship with Luke, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, and his wife Cheryl. Through this relationship, Alison has been able to explore her nascent bisexuality and enjoy the affection she has been denied by her reticent mother and absent father. While the members of the triad hold lofty principles about openness and trust, the practice of that relationship—and its ever-shifting unwritten rules—fail to live up to their ideals.

論文提要內容： 本篇論文旨在探討安•瑞克麗芙之《烏多夫堡秘辛》中十八世紀女性如何藉改造自身特質，逆轉身處不平等的劣勢。同時並引用瑪麗•烏爾史東考夫特的自由女性主義來分析小說文本。在小說中，瑞氏藉由女主角的冒險故事來剖析十八世紀的女性如何在父權社會中抗拒屈從，堅持自我存在的價值和追尋個人幸福。 本論文共分為五章。第一章概述瑞氏生平背景、作品特性、本小說之寫作背景、古今評論對本小說之評價，以及分析本文所應用的理論。第二章與第三章側重瑞氏對十八世紀之「感性」（sensibility）的分析。註1瑞氏在小說中以許多篇幅描寫「感性」對當時女性的深遠影響，並探討其正、反兩面的價值。有鑑於此，第二章討論瑞氏對「感性」強化女性膚淺、非理性等負面特質的批判。第三章探討瑞氏如何運用「感性」中知性、理性、利他三種正面價值來改變女性軟弱無能的特質。第四章乃瑞氏在小說中對於女權和女性獨立自主觀點之分析。最後一章為結論兼及小說寫作和瑞氏作品的貢獻。 / Abstract In The Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe describes the story of a young, middle-class woman. She illustrates how the innocent, sensitive protagonist fights against oppression, defends her value and finds her own happiness in the male dominated world. By describing the protagonist’s opposition to subordination, Radcliffe points out the necessity of changing women’s manners. The writer of this thesis explores Radcliffe’s concern with the social inferiority of women in The Mysteries of Udolpho. The writer also applies Mary Wollstonecraft’s liberal feminist thought in her discussion of Radcliffe. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction. It includes Ann Radcliffe and her works, the critical response, the theory employed in the textual analysis, namely Wollstonecraft’s liberal feminist thought and an overview of the eighteenth-century sensibility. The second chapter focuses on Radcliffe’s attack of the false sensibility and how it distorts the nature of women. The third chapter centers on the virtuous sensibility and how it functions as the power to reverse women’s social inferiority. In the fourth chapter, the stress will be laid upon issues of marriage, property and the meaning of independent women. The concluding chapter discusses the contribution of Radcliffe as novelist.