Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Regensburg, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 425-445).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 244-250). Also available via World Wide Web.

This study offers additional nuance to the garden topos and trope within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian women's writing and extends the critical discussion of landscape and the garden as archetype in Canadian literature. This dissertation cross-fertilizes literary analysis with garden theory, using the work of such garden historians as John Dixon Hunt, Mark Francis, and Randolph Hester. The argument emphasizes that gardens in literature, like their actual counterparts, are an art of milieu, reflective of their socio-physical contexts. Both real and textual gardens are rhetorical: their content and formal features invite interpretation. A textual garden performs similarly to an actual garden by providing a spatial frame; a means of naturalization; a vivid exemplar of growth, fertility and beauty; a mediation of the artificial and the natural; a space of paradox; and a site of social performance. / The specific focus of this study is "domestic gardens": gardens that are intimate, immediate to the home, and part of daily life. Chapter one separates the garden from archetypal models by studying the garden as an actual place (specifically, the backwoods kitchen garden) described in the works of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Chapter two examines how the garden influences Moodie's and Traill's writing of the "transplanted" female emigrant. Chapter three presents the bower as an important precursor to the domestic garden through Gabrielle Roy's Enchantment and Sorrow (1984) and "Garden in the Wind" (1975). Through the bower, Roy mediates the female artist's ambivalence toward home in her pursuit of independence. Chapter four explores Carol Shields' sanctification of the domestic in her fiction through the concept of paradise as both an ideal setting and a mode of being. Chapter five provides a "garden tour" of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, culminating in the garden as a model for the text itself and for the genre of palimpsest. For these writers, literal and figurative gardens are ways of "planting" their characters and personae, "plotting" their narratives, mediating social conventions, and providing an interpretative lens through which readers may perceive the texts as a whole.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 329-359). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99196

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Thesis (Ph.D.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Four Canadian women included are Lee Maracle, Joy Kogawa, Dianne Brand and Gail Scott. Bibliography: p. [354]-377.

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This thesis considers the critical implications of a cross-cultural reading of First Nations women’s writing in this time of sensitivity to the issues of appropriation and power inequities between dominant and minority cultures. A genre-based study, it is written from a deliberately split perspective: reading as both a white academic implicated in the dominant culture's production of meaning and value, and as a lesbian alienated from these same processes, I both propose and perform several modes of response to First Nations texts. Interspersed with a conventional commentary is a secondary, personal commentary that questions and qualifies the claims of the critical. Then, another level of response, in the form of fiction and poetry based on my own experiences growing up with my Assiniboine sister, also proposes the appropriateness, in this critical power dynamic, of a third response of simply answering story with story. Chapter One examines the construction of individual identity and responsibility in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, particularly as the text demands an emotionally-engaged response conventionally discouraged in critical discourse, and as a result redefines the genre of autobiography. Chapter Two considers the possibility of a communal and spiritual, as well as an individual, emotional, response to First Nations texts, examining the community of stories that comprise each of the novels Slash, In Search of April Raintree, and Honour the Sun. From this consideration of narrative as eliciting emotional and spiritual reading practices, Chapter Three discusses the nature of language itself as a vehicle of spiritual transformation and subversion, specifically in the poetry of Annharte and Beth Cuthand. Chapter Four, on the mixed-genre The Book of Jessica, shifts focus from the discursive strategies of First Nations writing, to examining the way these practices redefine time and history as newly accessible to First Nations spiritual construction. Finally, the Conclusion re-examines the reading strategies developed throughout the thesis, noting the pitfalls they avoid, while discussing their limitations as cross-cultural tools. The ultimate effect is to propose the very beginning of the kinds of changes the academy must consider for a truly non-appropriative cross-cultural interaction.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2003. / Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.