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This research began as an attempt to question to what extent a politics of solidarity and the evolution of a ‘transnational feminism’ which travels across borders can be established within Arab and Western literary novels. While this study, in spirit, takes its lead from the call for ‘feminism without borders’ within the writings of two contemporary women writers, the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Lebanese Hanan Al-Shaykh, it responds to the notion of transnationalism and literary ambassadorship from the perspective of Arab-Western relations. This process raises key questions for the reading of women’s writings across sensitive cultural divides: How can the literary contributions of Margaret Atwood and Hanan Al-Shaykh help in reshaping the form and content of a transnational and cultural interaction between the Arab World and the West? Do women writers articulate their concerns in the same manner across cultures? To what extent can literature cross borders and be fully engaged within diverse women’s concerns? And what might hinder the circulation of a transnational literary interaction? These contemporary women writers have been studied in the belief that their novels are committed to a transnational feminist agenda. Both writers place their feminist concerns within a national framework that they constantly negotiate. However, this comparison to test the value of women’s writings across borders has been challenged by a more complex study of factors that intervene along the way. The politics of reception, the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of the writers’ literary texts, the writers’ own shifting allegiances moving from nationalism to broader multicultural, cosmopolitan and transnational frameworks, are all factors to be taken into account. These factors have a direct impact on the context through which the literary texts have to be studied. Hence, this study seeks to contribute to this task by showing how these writers are engaged in the process of adjusting, reconstructing and even transcending their cultural milieus.

This paper is a collection of three short stories. A short preface discussing the origin of the tales precedes the stories. Fractions and Equations is the story of a love triangle. In this tale, the development of love between two people is told. There is no resolution in the tale. The second story, The Sailing of the Fantasy Cafe, tells of the operation of a book shop at Christmas time. The main characters in the story are described and several important incidents are also related. The tale ends with a Christmas party. The final story, And Penance More Must Do, deals with the life of a young teacher. The story begins in Africa and ends in America. During the course of the story the mind and heart of the main character are probed in detail.

This thesis explores the influence of the voluminous travel literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the imagination of Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Byron, with particular reference to the theme of suffering in travel. It examines the ways in which Romantic travel, and Romantic writings about travel, are often 'scripted' by a body of prior travel literature which today is largely overlooked. The travel texts in question all foreground the elements of danger and discomfort in the travelling experience, and the thesis begins by arguing that an interest in the traveller's misadventures was an integral part of the appeal of travel writing in this period, constituting almost a mode or sub-genre within Voyages and Travels. Taking one strand of this literature of 'misadventure', the narrative of shipwreck, mutiny and other maritime misadventures, Chapter 1 explores the different rhetorical strategies used by writers to recount the sufferings of travellers. Accounts by John Newton, William Dampier, John Byron, George Shelvocke and others illustrate, broadly, a shift from Providentialism to sentimentalism in the handling of misadventure; they illustrate also the various philosophical, theological and political issues which are involved for any reader trying to make sense of the sufferings described. Chapter 2 then considers how these conventions of misadventure are borrowed by another sub-genre of Voyages and Travels, the exploration narrative. Using the accounts of James Cook, John Ross, Edward Parry, James Bruce and Mungo Park, the chapter argues that in being thus exploited by explorers, a further layer of political significance - touching on matters of empire and modernity attaches itself to the idea of suffering in travel. Chapters 1 and 2 illuminate positive stimuli to the Romantic interest in misadventure, showing how suffering in travel could be regarded as signifying, variously, divine election, authenticity, moral worth, political protest, and much else besides. Chapter 3 is short contextual chapter which suggests that there was also a negative stimulus to the Romantic taste, for misadventure, in the form of a rapidly growing, diversifying tourism. Focussing especially on the picturesque tourist delineated by William Gilpin, and the classical Grand Tourist influenced by Joseph Addison, it suggests that Romantic writers and travellers prized discomfort and danger in travel not only for its own sake, but also because it served to distinguish them from other types of recreational traveller. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss Wordsworth and Byron respectively, showing how the conventions and attitudes explored in Chapters 1 and 2, and the use of travel as a mode of social distinction explored in Chapter 3, play out in both the writings and the actual travels of these two major Romantic figures. Both men present themselves as misadventurers, and borrow rhetorical strategies from the earlier travel literature to do so. At the same time, Wordsworth and Byron each borrow different elements from the earlier texts, or make a different inflection of the same inherited conventions. Exploring these differences, and referring to a range of texts notably the Salisbury Plain poems, The Borderers and the 'Analogy Passage' of The Prelude for Wordsworth, and Childe Harold, Don Juan Canto 2 and The Island for Byron chapters 4 and 5 articulate the very different political, philosophical and aesthetic points being made by Wordsworth and Byron as they pose, both on the page and in actuality, as suffering travellers.

This thesis offers a close reading and an analysis of the Vida of Madre María Magdalena Lorravaquio. It is the purpose of this thesis to examine how Lorravaquio expresses agency, authority and power throughout her Vida by means of the rhetoric of imitatio Christi and descriptions of her visions and illnesses. For the aim of this work, agency is interpreted as free-will and consciousness in terms of action; as a result, the author and the work itself, both of which demonstrate agency, exude power and authority. This type of analysis will explore if the Vida genre can be read as quasi-feminist texts.

I have elected to write a creative nonfiction thesis because it serves to demonstrate my proficiency in the areas of rhetoric and composition. This thesis consists of a series of personal essays based on my effort to reclaim my voice as a writer. In order to organize these essays, I used the eight trigrams, or universal elements, found in the ancient Chinese I Ching, Book of Changes. They are: Heaven, Thunder, Water, Mountain, Earth, Wind, Fire, and Lake. One by one, I interpreted each element in an effort to create a transformation narrative, my own Book of Changes. Despite the chaos of my real story, the universal elements offered a grounding for each essay. Each essay illustrates my survival as a woman and as a writer. Although these essays grew out of a deeply personal experience, this thesis is about crafting an essay-reclaiming my voice and my body of writing. / Graduation date: 2003

Thesis (M.A. ) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 355-365). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Abstract only. Title from OhioLINK abstract page.

In this study on the depiction of the death of the Arab intellectual in elegiac writings since 1967, I examine the ways in which modern and contemporary Arab writers who identify with different literary and historical generations have mourned and commemorated the death of other Arab intellectuals. Drawing on theoretical contributions from psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and gender studies, particularly those investigating the articulations of masculinity and femininity in mourning practices, I argue that the psychological and political imprints of loss that emerge in the modern and contemporary elegies, eulogies, novels, and memoirs that I analyze, contribute to an elegiac discourse that is melancholic at its core. Both a somber outlook towards the world and a resistance to complete the work of mourning, melancholia, as I interpret it in my analysis of Arabic elegiac writings, is an emotion experienced collectively and subsequently channeled in the literary text. In their elegiac writings, the poets Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Samih al-Qasem (b. 1939), Mohammad al-Maghout (1934-2006), and the novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-2004), have expressed a collective disillusionment with the modern role Arab intellectual and his embodiment of his generation’s political and ethical sensibilities following the 1967 war. These writers, I argue, understand the death of their peers as a signifier of their generation’s failure to lead their societies to the socialist and nationalist utopias that they have collectivity imagined. I demonstrate how in their elegiac writings, these poets and novelists in fact lament themselves and the collapse of their own modernist intellectual project in which they had attributed to the written word the power of collective salvation. As I investigate the commemoration of the intellectual in contemporary elegiac texts, I explore the works of young writers such as the Lebanese Rabih Jaber (b. 1974) and the Saudi Seba al-Herz (b. circa 1984). By gradually disengaging from the elegiac modes that their precursors had defined in the 1960s and 1970s, the two novelists have formulated counternarratives of mourning. The narrative that emanates from this literary subversion, I contend, presents a distinctive elegiac rhetoric, in which melancholia ceases to be a collective condition, but rather an individual and intimate state of mind of young protagonists marginalized by and critical of the dominant intellectual circles. / text