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This thesis uses affect theory and studies of emotion to analyse literary representations of the everyday in fictional and non-fictional writing about Muslim migrant women in the UK from 1906 to 2012. Postcolonial literary studies tend to value exceptional events over mundane life, which causes possible issues of exoticism and a danger of homogenising distinct experiences. This thesis offers a theorisation of migration that foregrounds everyday experience through an engagement with theories of objects, bodies and space, as well as emotional experiences that are specific to migrant subjectivity. It analyses two groups of texts: early twentieth century travel writing by Atiya Fyzee, Shahbano Begum Maimoona Sultan and Zeyneb Hanoum, and contemporary literary texts by Yeshim Ternar, Farhana Sheikh, Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak and Fadia Faqir. The thesis is structured thematically into three sections, each section containing two chapters, one about travel writing and another about contemporary texts. In the first section, in order to examine how the texts negotiate foreignness in daily life, I consider hospitality theory, which describes how social power relations are based on roles of host and guest. In the second section, I argue that melancholia is an emotional experience endemic to migrancy. The texts demonstrate how this emotion is manifest communally as well as individually, which also shows the political potential of emotion. In the third section, I investigate how emotional processes of migration are described spatially in the texts. The findings of this research show that emotional knowledge is a major concern for migrant writers as a way of engaging with and critiquing the social and political climates of each text. This is produced through narrations about feeling in general and specific emotions, such as irritation or anxiety. Emotional experience is illustrated in conjunction with identities that are both fluid and intersectional, where gender and class converge with ethnicity and religion. The texts also show specifically affective styles of writing that concentrate on focalising women's intimate experiences through, for example, diary entries, bildungsroman or psychological realism. While the differing contexts reflect the particularities of each experience, there are sufficient similarities of narrative content and style to suggest that affective experience is a major concern for this body of literature. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the productive uses of affect theory as a critical stance for analysing postcolonial literature.

This study examines how travelogues by the Russian author Anton Chekhov, an American, George Kennan and a British citizen, Harry de Windt, contributed towards establishing the image of Siberia towards the end of the 19th century, juxtaposing their individual views against the commonly perceived view of the region at the time. In examining the texts, a literary analysis is merged with elements of other approaches, through a strong thematic focus, centring on the cultural and ideological assumptions implied in the texts. The findings reveal that both native inhabitants and foreigners are capable of expressing a justifiable opinion on a locality, resulting in different versions of what is observed, from divergent points of view. Although the three writers in this study appear to support a negative view of Siberia, closer investigation show evidence of optimism about the eventual destiny of a region in a stage of transition. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Russian)

Mon travail de recherche se propose de combler des lacunes concernant l’iconogaphie des femmes sud-américaines. Etant donné l’absence d’écoles d’art ainsi que d’ateliers d’impression en Grande Colombie jusqu’à la première moitié du XIXe siècle, les images en général sont rares. Quand on en trouve, il s’agit des portraits de quelques femmes extraordinaires comme des saintes ou des épouses des hauts fonctionnaires, donc des représentantes d’une minorité aisée et créole. Les artistes locaux ont surtout peint les grands hommes et notamment les héros des jeunes Républiques. En revanche, sur la vie quotidienne de la plupart des femmes, qu’elles soient Indiennes, Métisses, Noires ou même Créoles, nous n’avons que très peu de témoignages. La Grande Colombie comme la Nouvelle Grenade, par ailleurs, souffrait d’un manque d’attrait. Cette région n’a jamais représentée dans l’imaginaire des voyageurs européens, les richesses légendaires des vice-royautés du Pérou ou de la Nouvelle Espagne (Mexique). C’est seulement à l’orée du XIXe siècle que cette zone équatoriale commence à faire parler d’elle et ce changement significatif est dû au grand voyage scientifique de Humboldt et Bonpland. Grâce à la médiatisation de ces explorateurs, un nombre important de voyageurs français décide de suivre leurs pas. Parmi eux, un petit nombre écrit et publie des récits illustrés. Leurs gravures et lithographies apportent donc les documents nécessaires pour combler en partie le vide pictural féminin. Ces images n’ont jusque là pas suscitées d’études historiques approfondies d’autant qu’elles ont longtemps été considérées comme des simples ornements accompagnant le texte. Cette thèse propose de démontrer, au contraire, le rôle primordial de cette iconographie, sa puissance symbolique et sa contribution au discours qui caractérise alors la littérature de voyage. Qu’elles soient guidées par des observations concrètes ou par la pure imagination, ces descriptions picturales et littéraires permettent de dégager les principaux stéréotypes élaborés sur les femmes grande-colombiennes et ce malgré leur riche multiplicité. / The aim of this thesis is to fill in certain gaps in the iconographic treatment of South American women. Due to the lack of art schools and printing workshops in Gran Colombia through the first half of the nineteenth century, images in general are rare. The existing works are portraits of such extraordinary women as saints or wives of important officials, thus representatives of a wealthy Creole minority. Local artists tended to choose as subjects prominent men, notably the heroes of the young Republics. By contrast, the daily lives of most women, whether Indian, Métis, Black or even Creole, were rarely featured. In addition, like New Granada, Gran Colombia suffered from a relative lack of attractiveness. In the imagination of European travelers this region never represented the legendary wealth of Viceroyalties like Peru or New Spain (Mexico). It was only at the dawn of the nineteenth century that this equatorial zone attracted significant interest due in large part to the great scientific exploration of Humboldt and Bonpland. Thanks to their many publications, a large number of French travelers decided to follow their footsteps. Among them, a small group wrote and published illustrated volumes. Their engravings and lithographs provide the material needed to restore at least partially the lack of female images. To this point such iconography has not generated in-depth historical study, since it has long been considered merely ornamental and secondary to the text. This thesis proposes to demonstrate the contrary by focusing upon the sizeable role of this iconography, its symbolic power and its contribution to the discourse then characteristic of travel literature. Based upon specific observations or drawn purely from imagination, these pictorial and literary descriptions enable the identification of the principal stereotypes developed to characterize Gran Colombian women, despite the fact of their rich cultural multiplicity. / La presente tesis busca llenar algunos vacíos existentes en los estudios sobre la representación iconográfica de las mujeres suramericanas. Debido a la ausencia de escuelas de Bellas Artes y talleres de impresión en la Gran Colombia hasta mediados del siglo XIX, la producción general de imágenes era escasa. Los artistas locales apostaban por retratar a hombres influyentes, particularmente los héroes de la naciente República, y las pocas obras sobre mujeres que se realizaban correspondían a santas o esposas de los altos funcionarios, representantes de la opulenta minoría criolla. Son entonces pocos los testimonios iconográficos que se conservan de la vida cotidiana de la mayoría de las mujeres de origen amerindio, mestizo, negro e incluso criollo. La Gran Colombia sufría además de la misma falta de atracción que aisló durante siglos a la Nueva Granada: en el imaginario de los viajeros europeos, la región no se comparaba con la legendaria riqueza de los virreinatos de Perú y Nueva España. Sólo hasta principios del siglo XIX, la América equinoccial se convirtió en un centro de interés tras las expediciones científicas de Humboldt y Bonpland. Gracias a sus múltiples publicaciones, varios viajeros franceses decidieron seguir sus pasos, publicando, además, sus relatos de viaje ilustrados con grabados y litografías. Unos trabajos que proveen el material necesario para suplir, al menos parcialmente, la ausencia de imágenes femeninas en la Gran Colombia. Hasta la fecha, esta iconografía no ha generado estudios históricos específicos pues ha sido considerada siempre ornamental y secundaria frente al texto de los relatos. El objetivo de este estudio es entonces demostrar lo contrario, revelando su papel protagónico, su poder simbólico y su influencia en el discurso literario característico de los relatos de viajeros. Por tanto, ya sean inspiradas por la imaginación o guiadas por la observación empírica, las descripciones pictóricas y literarias de estos relatos permiten la identificación de los principales estereotipos elaborados sobre las mujeres grancolombianas a pesar de su heterogeneidad cultural.

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This thesis uses ecofeminist and human-animal studies lenses to explore human animal and nonhuman animal relations in early America. Most ecocritical studies of American literature begin with nineteenth-century writers. This project, however, suggests that drawing on ecofeminist theories with a human-animal studies approach sheds light on eighteenth-century texts as well. Early American naturalist travel writing offers a site replete with human and nonhuman encounters. Specifically, naturalist William Bartram's travel journal features interactions with animals in the southern colonial American frontier. Amateur naturalist Elizabeth House Trist's travel diary includes interactions with frontier and domestic animals. Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, a conduct manual that taught children acceptable behavior towards animals, provides insight about the social regulation of human and nonhuman relationships during the late eighteenth century, when Bartram and Trist wrote their texts. This thesis identifies and analyzes textual sites that blur the human subject/and animal object distinction and raise questions about the representation of animals as objects. This project focuses on the subtle discursive subversions of early Euroamerican naturalist science present in Bartram's Travels (1791) and the blurring of human/animal boundaries in Trist's Travel Diary (1783-84); Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1794) further complicates the Euroamerican discourse of animals as curiosities. These texts form part of a larger but overlooked discourse in early British America that anticipated more well-known and nonhuman-centric texts in the burgeoning early nineteenth-century American animal rights movement.

Working at the intersection of narrative studies and political theory, this thesis performs an original critical intervention in Gulliver’s Travels studies to establish the work as an intertextual response to the hegemonic articulations of European travel writing produced between the 15th and 18th centuries under the discourse of Discovery. My argument proceeds through two movements. First, an archeology of studies on Gulliver’s Travels that identifies key developments and points of significance in analyses of the satire’s intertextual relationship with travel writing. Second, a discursive analysis of the role of Discovery generally, and travel writing specifically, in constructing European hegemony within a newly global context. Together these movements allow me to locate Gulliver’s Travels firmly within the discourse of Discovery and to specify the politics of the text and the poetics of its operations. For this analysis I adopt a conceptualization of hegemony elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which defines discourse as a structured totality of elements of signification, wherein the meaning and identify of each element is constituted by articulatory practices competing to fix the differences and equivalences between it and others within the discourse. An hegemonic discourse is one that successfully limits the possibility of novel articulations according to a particular governing logic. In the Age of Discovery, this governing logic, I argue, is a socio-spatial logic that constructed the “European” subject through its difference from the “Non-European,” the “civilized” subject through its difference from the “savage,” and the “free land” of the “savage” peoples through its difference from the occupied lands of the “civilized.” To conduct the concomitant critical analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, I draw upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of the “distribution of the sensible,” which refers both to the partitions determined in sensory experience that anticipate the distributions of parts and wholes, the orders of visibility and invisibility, and the relationships of address or comportment beneath every community; and to the specific practices that partake of these distributions to establish the “common sense” about the objects that make up the common world, the ways in which it is organized, and the capacities of the people within it. This enables me to establish travel writing as an articulatory practice that utilized a narrative modality to “reveal” the globe in a Eurocentric image dependent upon the logic of Discovery: a discursively constructed paradigm that I identify as what others have labeled “travel realism,” which organized the globe into a single field of discursivity predicated upon the “civilizational” and “rational” superiority of Europeans over their non-European Others. Gulliver’s Travels, I conclude, intervenes in this distribution of the sensible by utilizing the satirical form as a recomposing logic to upend the paradigm of travel realism and break away from the “sense” that it makes of the bodies, beings, and lands it re-presents. / Graduate