This thesis explores the psychological development of liminal characters in four late-twentieth-century British novels. Studies of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert's Parrot, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by using D. W. Winnicott’s transitional-objects theory and Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective theory, show how characters who are little more than infants socially and psychologically attempt to transcend the transitional, liminal status defined by Victor Turner. With the aid of significant objects or equal other subjects, these characters, whose subjective self-constructions at the beginning of the novels have become stalled in an immature position of emotional development or been inhibited by dominating individuals, progress psychologically towards controlling their own subjectivity.

This thesis is a study of the narrative language of Elsa Beskow, Sweden's most famous children's writer of the early twentieth century. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to the understanding of why Beskow's stories are still among the most popular children's books in Sweden, more than a hundred years after her literary debut. My investigation is a quantitative study of word-class distribution, various syntactic features, and readability in four picture-books and four other stories. To begin with, Beskow's language is compared to that of other texts written for young readers, including children's fiction, a contemporary reading-book, and popular comic strips. The results indicate that Beskow has something in common with all of these materials, especially with children's fiction. However, she also has her own style, which is different from the children's fiction I compare with. For example, her sentences are comparatively long and often begin with a conjunction. Moreover, Beskow uses many address phrases and interjectional phrases, and the initial clause-constituent is often some other clause element than the subject. Additionally, Beskow's narrative language is compared to conversational language and to formal prose. The results show that Beskow moves along the whole scale, from conversation to formal writing, depending on what aspect of her language use is considered. In some cases, her style even falls outside of the scale. For example, placing the subject in initial position is less common in Beskow's writing than in both conversation and formal writing. Finally, the variation between Beskow's texts is examined. The analysis shows, among other things, that the oral influences on Beskow's style increased during the five decades she wrote stories.

Art Music for the acoustic piano has changed tremendously during the twentieth century. Some of the techniques and skills pianists need to master in order to be able to perform successfully twentieth-century art piano music include: a refined ability to discriminate varied layers of sonorities; sophisticated pedal combinations; a sometimes percussive technique; and superior control of complex metric and rhythmic passages. New combinations of patterns that require specific technical preparation pose substantial pianistic challenges. Todays pianist needs to master a variety of glissandi, chords, or single melody textures played directly on the strings inside the piano and to combine such techniques with sounds beyond the traditional piano sonorities. Besides technical preparation, pianists must also acquire sufficient knowledge of twentieth-century compositional techniques and analytical methods, as well as composers individual styles and their contributions to new ways of using the acoustic piano. This document focuses on selected twentieth-century piano compositions by Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Bartk, Cowell, Cage, Holliger, Crumb, Corigliano, and Louie. These composers and their works are discussed with an emphasis on the new expressive, technical, artistic, pedagogical, and performance elements they introduce. The original technical exercises in Appendix A employ twentieth-century scales, harmonies, and progressions. These exercises will facilitate the development of technical skills related to the pieces considered here and to other twentieth-century piano repertoire. The interviews with John Corigliano and Alexina Louie provide uniquely insightful and provocative glimpses of the creative and technical issues involved with two remarkably original artistic conceptions in this repertoire. It is almost a truism to observe that much of the piano music of the twentieth century eschews convention and invents its own vocabulary and syntax. At the beginning of a new century, we are able to gain an historic perspective upon this body of repertoire. This document will lead to an increased awareness and understanding of selected twentieth-century piano repertoire. It suggests that twentieth-century piano compositions should assume an important and equal place with the more traditional music in the pianists repertoire and in the university and conservatoire curricula.

The murderess in the twenty-first century is a figure of particular cultural fascination; she is the subject of innumerable books, websites, documentaries and award-winning movies. With female violence reportedly on the increase, a rethinking of beliefs about women's natural propensity towards violent and aggressive behaviours is inevitable. Using the Victorian period as a central focus, this thesis explores the contradictory ideologies regarding women's violence and also suggests an alternative approach to the relationship between gender and violence in the future. A study of violent women in representation reveals how Victorian attitudes towards violence and femininity persist today. On the one hand, women have traditionally been cast as the naturally non-aggressive victims of violence rather than its perpetrators; on the other hand, the destructive potential of womanhood has been a cause of anxiety since the earliest Western mythology. I suggest that it is a desire to resolve this contradiction that has resulted in the proliferation of violent women in representation over the last one and a half centuries. In particular, an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century popular fiction indicates that the stronger the ideal of the angelic woman was, the greater the anxiety produced by her demonic antithesis. Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate both the contradictory Victorian attitudes towards violent women and a need to reconcile the combination of good and bad femininity that the murderess represents. Revisiting the Victorian murderess in the late twentieth century provides a potential means for resolving this contradiction; specifically, it enables the violent woman to engage in a process of self-representation that was not available to her in the nineteenth century. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace suggests that any insight into the murderess begins with listening to the previously silenced voice of the violent woman herself.

Appalshop, a multi-media and arts organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky emerged in 1969 at the crossroads of several different developments. It started as a War on Poverty program and its history exhibits the contradictory ideologies that fueled that effort and the political changes that forestalled it. The production company began in the midst of technological advances in media and is an early example of the democratization of technology and the potential of portable video equipment in affecting social change. Most importantly, its genesis is located within the context of a renewed interest in Appalachian history and culture and the related issues of negotiating regional cultural identity in the American national context. This one small organization in Eastern Kentucky provides a window to a wide slice of American history and culture in the midst of profound changes. Throughout the twentieth century the Appalachian region has been repeatedly characterized in mainstream American culture in an overtly negative light. Appalshop played an integral role in countering these characterizations and the stereotypes they generated and reinforced. Technology became more accessible the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, Appalshop was able to challenge these negative perceptions of the region in the national mind by placing cameras, printing capabilities, drama, and visual art in the hands of Appalachians. This allowed them to speak for themselves—first to each other and eventually to the nation. This dissertation focuses on the founding of the Community Film Workshop of Appalachia, the subsequent abandonment of the project by the federal government, the acquisition of control over its artistic output by artists and staff members, and its expansion between 1969 and 1984. It also addresses the significant role Appalshop played in the burgeoning Appalachian social movement context that emerged concurrently with its founding and its related role as a social change organization.

In Dharma Bums (1958), by Jack Kerouac, and Americana (1971), by Don DeLillo, the authors explore the complexity of selfhood as pertaining to individual identity and subjectivity in mid-twentieth century American culture and consciousness, paying specific attention to the relation that these concepts have with media, spatiality, and Buddhism. Although numerous critics provide extensive analyses of these texts, authors, and themes, no critic has paired these texts and authors, and investigated these particular themes in relation to selfhood. I argue that in Dharma Bums and Americana, Kerouac and DeLillo each investigate the influence of media, spatiality, and Buddhism on selfhood, as well as provide competing models of selfhood that offer either self-transformation or self-limitation.

In his writing on the nature and purpose of the novel between 1895 and 1911, Wells endorses artistic principles for their social effects. His public lecture on “The Contemporary Novel,” written in 1911 in response to a debate with Henry James, is the most lucid articulation of his artistic principles, and his later autobiographical reflections on the debate obscure the clarity of the earlier version. Wells’s artistic principles emerge in his reviews of contemporary fiction for the Saturday Review (1895–1897), where he extends Poe’s concept of “unity of effect” to the novel and justifies his preference for social realism with a theory of cultural evolution. His views develop further in the context of sociological and philosophical debates between 1901 and 1905. Wells commenced the century with a sceptical view on the social effects of literature, but his exposure to British Pragmatism encouraged him to revive the principles developed in his reviewing. The view on Wells’s conception of the novel presented in this thesis challenges the prevailing view that he began his career with a set of purely artistic principles, adding sociological and intellectual apparatus after the turn of the century.

Dating back to the dialectic between Socrates and Plato, innovative technologies have disrupted the traditions of discourse and created cultural divisions relevant to composition studies. These conversations are echoed in the Twentieth Century through the work of Melvin Kranzberg. Looking to the future, he sought to record the history of technology to maintain the constant upsurge of innovation. Like Kranzberg’s history of technology, the field of rhetoric and composition and this thesis seek to define technology and understand its value in order to navigate and interrogate effectively the deluge of twenty-first-century new media. Kranzberg—like many scholars in computers and composition—utilized various rhetorics to advocate for technological literacy despite its unpopularity in the academy.

“Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature” examines Mexican literature from 1940 to 1980. It analyzes representations of collective bodies and suggests that these bodies illustrate oppression and resistance in their historical context, which coincides with the beginning of a period of massive modernization in Mexico. I aim to develop a reading that interprets this imagery of collectives, unusual bodies, and blindness as more than symbols of oppression. By examining this imagery alongside representations of pilgrimage, alternative modes of motherhood, and experiences such as miracles that figuratively connect bodies, I propose that these images challenge their historical context, and can be read as a gesture towards resistance. Novels and short stories by José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos and Vicente Leñero present collectives, blindness and unusual bodies. My reading of their works connects these textual bodies to oppression within their historical context, in particular, by the government, intellectuals, the medical system, the Catholic Church, family structure, the landholding system, and the land’s heat, wind and drought. These representations de-individualize characters, and, as such, destroy the ideal of the modern subject who would effect change through individual agency. Thus, when I argue that these same bodies act as a metaphorical collective subject whose actions, such as mass murder, and participation in religious revival and radical political movements, can point out social change, they challenge the ideal of an individual subject. By reflecting on the connection between literature that represents unusual bodies, a historical situation of oppression, and the potential for resistance, this analysis of literary texts provides a lens through which we can examine the stories’ historical context and ideas of individual and collective agency.

“Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature” examines Mexican literature from 1940 to 1980. It analyzes representations of collective bodies and suggests that these bodies illustrate oppression and resistance in their historical context, which coincides with the beginning of a period of massive modernization in Mexico. I aim to develop a reading that interprets this imagery of collectives, unusual bodies, and blindness as more than symbols of oppression. By examining this imagery alongside representations of pilgrimage, alternative modes of motherhood, and experiences such as miracles that figuratively connect bodies, I propose that these images challenge their historical context, and can be read as a gesture towards resistance. Novels and short stories by José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos and Vicente Leñero present collectives, blindness and unusual bodies. My reading of their works connects these textual bodies to oppression within their historical context, in particular, by the government, intellectuals, the medical system, the Catholic Church, family structure, the landholding system, and the land’s heat, wind and drought. These representations de-individualize characters, and, as such, destroy the ideal of the modern subject who would effect change through individual agency. Thus, when I argue that these same bodies act as a metaphorical collective subject whose actions, such as mass murder, and participation in religious revival and radical political movements, can point out social change, they challenge the ideal of an individual subject. By reflecting on the connection between literature that represents unusual bodies, a historical situation of oppression, and the potential for resistance, this analysis of literary texts provides a lens through which we can examine the stories’ historical context and ideas of individual and collective agency.