The purpose of this essay was to investigate how a functional and committed online community was established. We have analyzed a Facebook group named "On Edge - a community for girls who seeks adventures" to explore how On Edge is communicating to create dedication and identification amongst its members in their online community. The study has combined theories such as social identity theory, prosumption, participatory culture and mediatization theory. We have used a multimodal analysis to analyze the administrators and the members posts on Facebook, an online survey for On Edge’s members to answer and an interview with the founder of the community, Ebba Cronqvist. The result of the multimodal analysis showed that On Edge uses text and images to create a united language within the group that leads to dedication and identification to the community. The survey showed that most of the members felt a need of a place where adventurous women could meet other women who are alike. They help each other because of the friendly atmosphere and by the meaningful exchange of thoughts and minds. We also found that there are some fundamental forces that shapes On Edge to such a well working community: the group is driven by a strong “why”, and by using a language appropriate for the target group together with images, it creates a friendly atmosphere amongst the members in the group.

À l'aube du XXIe siècle, la littérature merveilleuse connaît un regain de popularité, particulièrement avec la venue de phénomènes éditoriaux tels que la série Harry Potter. Les sept romans de Joanne Kathleen Rowling, publiés entre 1997 et 2007, sont l'objet d'une popularité toujours croissante à chaque nouvelle publication. L'intérêt pour la littérature merveilleuse n'est cependant pas nouveau, particulièrement en Grande-Bretagne; en effet, ce point du globe a été le berceau d'une vague d'engouement pour la littérature merveilleuse tout aussi forte environ 150 ans plus tôt, avec la publication du roman Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. La liste des auteurs qui ont été inspirés par Carroll, ou du moins qui ont contribué à faire gonfler la vague, est passablement longue. Dans ces sociétés où l'enfant possède une importance capitale, que ce soit la société victorienne ou la nôtre, il n'est pas si étonnant que les ouvrages qui le concernent captent autant l'intérêt du public. Cependant, ce ne sont pas tous les romans qui parlent des enfants qui connaissent le même succès; comment expliquer que le choix des lecteurs s'arrête sur telle œuvre plutôt que sur telle autre? Nous postulons que la popularité de certains ouvrages réside principalement dans le processus de lecture qui prévaut dans chacun d'eux. L'acte de lecture est une activité complexe; certains textes demandent à être lus un peu de la façon dont on participe à un jeu, soit en étant confronté à des indéterminations et en résolvant des énigmes, mais surtout en se laissant prendre au jeu du « let's pretend ». Dans les œuvres qui retiennent notre attention pour cette étude, soit les deux romans de Carroll mettant en scène le personnage d'Alice ainsi que les sept romans de la série Harry Potter, de nombreux effets de lecture nous permettent de démontrer ce postulat. Dans le premier chapitre, nous procédons à un court compte-rendu des connaissances concernant les genres littéraires auxquels se rattachent les œuvres de notre corpus, c'est-à-dire le merveilleux et la fantasy, ainsi que les éléments caractéristiques de ceux-ci. Nous présentons ensuite différents outils provenant des théories de la lecture qui nous permettront de mieux saisir les mécanismes du texte contribuant à provoquer un fort phénomène d'adhésion chez le lectorat, tels que la théorie des mondes possibles (Eco) ou celle des univers fictionnels (Pavel), les concepts d'indétermination (Iser) et de préconstruit (Thérien), les régies de lecture (Gervais) ainsi que des théories présentant la lecture comme un jeu (Calinescu et Picard). Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous montrons comment les œuvres de notre corpus, en s'inscrivant dans le genre merveilleux et en parlant de l'enfant, suggèrent un cadre de lecture ludique. Les nombreuses allusions au jeu qui les parsèment, que ce soit le jeu d'échec, de Quidditch, ou encore celui du « faire-semblant », ainsi que les stratégies textuelles qui s'y trouvent conduisent le lecteur à procéder à une construction mentale des univers qui lui sont présentés de la même façon qu'il résoudrait des énigmes. Les blancs laissés dans le texte contribuent à stimuler son imagination et les effets de surprise, largement présents dans ces textes, augmentent le plaisir ressenti lors de la lecture. Toujours dans le deuxième chapitre, nous démontrons que les auteurs utilisent des procédés semblables en ce qui concerne l'organisation spatiale de leurs univers; ils utilisent des frontières instables et perméables qui font hésiter le lecteur quant aux propriétés du monde dans lequel il pénètre et qui le désorientent. Enfin, dans le troisième chapitre, nous voyons comment l'identité des personnages se construit autour d'un noyau fixe, constitué par le nom du personnage, ainsi que d'une partie mobile et morcelée, soumise aux transformations. La quête identitaire qui fait l'objet des œuvres de notre corpus contribue à renforcer l'identification au personnage, puisque ces œuvres s'organisent autour d'une construction en miroir, qui fait en sorte que le monde de la fiction reflète le monde réel connu du lecteur. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : merveilleux, fantasy, lecture, mondes possibles, univers fictionnels, indéterminations, préconstruits, jeu, enfance, identité, miroir, Lewis Carroll, J.K. Rowling, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Harry Potter.

Victorian serial novels were bound with pages upon pages of advertisements marketing goods to readers, yet the relative inattention paid to this significant material component of the novel is surprising. This project explores the interaction between fictional narrative and commercial advertisements, and aims to recover the material context in which three Victorian novels—Bleak House, Middlemarch, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—were first published and read. These three case studies—a novel published in 20 monthly serial numbers, another packaged in the rare format of eight “books” in bimonthly installments, and the third published in a monthly magazine in three excerpts—are exemplary of a larger phenomenon in Victorian book production wherein fiction and commerce were inextricably bound. This project investigates the ways in which the advertisements can be reconceived as a significant element of the novel, mediating the reader’s experience of the text. The Bleak House chapter examines how the advertisements for hair products in the “Bleak House Advertiser” serve to highlight an aspect of Charles Dickens’s text about Victorian responses to the mass of new consumer goods and individuals’ desire to control the physical aspects of their world. The following chapter considers George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) Middlemarch, finding that just as the narrator’s asides compel readers to attend to the temporal difference between the 1830s setting of the novel and the 1870s perspective of the serial edition, sewing machine advertisements in the advertising supplement of the novel serve to remind readers of their role as observers of past events. The examination of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’s) Huck Finn, as published in three excerpts in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, demonstrates that the magazine articles, the excerpts from Huck Finn, and the advertisements all engage in a project of unifying the nation and alleviating the physical and metaphorical wounds of war. The unity of the message emerges when the excerpts are read together with the many advertisements for wheelchairs and other such implements for disabled bodies. The dissertation ends with a chapter indicating the merits of further analysis and critical discussion of advertisements in the undergraduate literature classroom. / text

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002) tells the story of a motherless fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, raised by a cruel father, who desperately searches for clues to unlock her mother’s past. Kidd’s bildungsroman reveals the incredible power of black women, particularly a group of beekeeping sisters and a black Mary, to create a safe haven where Lily can examine her fragmented life and develop psychologically, finally becoming a self-actualized young lady. Lily’s matriarchal world of influence both compares and contrasts with the patriarchal world represented in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exposing the matriarchy’s aptly structured ways of providing a more healing environment than is Huck Finn’s. Kidd’s novel also showcases the stylistic strategies of first person narrative point of view, language, dialect, and the motif of place in order to contextualize the social awareness and psychological development Lily gains through her journey.

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002) tells the story of a motherless fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, raised by a cruel father, who desperately searches for clues to unlock her mother’s past. Kidd’s bildungsroman reveals the incredible power of black women, particularly a group of beekeeping sisters and a black Mary, to create a safe haven where Lily can examine her fragmented life and develop psychologically, finally becoming a self-actualized young lady. Lily’s matriarchal world of influence both compares and contrasts with the patriarchal world represented in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exposing the matriarchy’s aptly structured ways of providing a more healing environment than is Huck Finn’s. Kidd’s novel also showcases the stylistic strategies of first person narrative point of view, language, dialect, and the motif of place in order to contextualize the social awareness and psychological development Lily gains through her journey.

Introduction: Alice in Wonderland is perhaps the most renowned fantasy book for children. Over and above this though, it has relevance for adults. People too often dismiss it as purely escapist reading, a means to escape from the monotony of everyday realism by delving into the realms of fantasy. Many critics propose that it operates on more than one level and I would have to agree - it is a pioneer of children's literature as well as a product and critique of the Victorian age. It is a story that has captured the world's imagination, with vivid characters and exciting adventures. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, although not as well known, equally offers an insight into the late nineteenth-century. I intend to explore the many layers found in these stories, and hope to expose them as being more than mere narratives, but as pieces of literature that thrive because they are so cleverly constructed Perhaps also their success lies in that they deal with the universal theme (for children and adults alike) of making sense of the seemingly nonsensical aspects of life and society. The stories, as well as the strange characters and happenings, are reminiscent of the Absurdist genre in drama, in which the objective is to turn the world upside down, so to speak, in order to understand people and society. My dissertation will begin by exploring the literary trends of children's books prior to 1865, in other words, before Alice in Wonderland was published. I intend to present an overview of Victorian and pre-Victorian children's fiction, tracing the development of the story for teaching and religious instruction, up until the time when the story was liberated to be simply the vehicle for pleasurable recreational purposes. Thus my opening chapter is an exploration of the didactic children's literature that dominated the early nineteenth century, examining the educationalists that helped expand the genre of children's literature. Next, I will include a brief biography of Lewis Carroll. It is important to my overall theme in that a biography sums up, in one human centre, the forces at play in Victorian sensibility. As a modern audience, we seem to seize upon the idea of his 'character', desperately attempting to understand what motivated him to write such tour de force stories. The interest for me at this point is to examine how academics have portrayed Carroll's 'character'. The motive behind this section is to beg the question of whether his complex personality affects our reading of the texts, or whether they can be seen as entirely separate from a life to which some scandal has been attributed. In the remainder of my dissertation, I shall focus on how the texts are a reflection of a typical Victorian child's experiences, and discuss how Alice 'grows' as a character, and what she reveals about her society in the process of discovering how she should define herself. Alice is the vehicle for Carroll's subversive commentary about his society, and her experiences in Wonderland and Looking-Glass land are often rooted in the undermining of conventional behaviour and traditions. Lastly, I will examine Carroll's stylistic organization of the narratives, paying particular attention to his treatment of time, dreams and language in the texts. I will discuss what his intentions are in creating 'nonsense that makes sense', as well as what this 'nonsense' discloses about the society he lived in and the values he seems to object to. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-205) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-205) and index.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) de Mark Twain (1835-1910) tem estado de modo frequente na berlinda. Em cada época, desde o seu lançamento, a proibição da obra, nas bibliotecas e escolas, foi motivada pelas temáticas tratadas, pelos dialetos criados ou pela reiteração da palavra nigger(s). No Brasil, as traduções da obra fazem parte do nosso Polissistema Literário de Tradução desde 1934 (Monteiro Lobato). Visto que a obra foi lançada há mais de cem anos, muitos têm se dedicado a ela, a fim de discutir suas principais controvérsias. Esta pesquisa visa a apresentar algo diferente na forma de analisar os dados da obra e de quatro de suas traduções. Para tanto, elegeu-se a Linguística de Corpus (LC) como metodologia e principal abordagem, pois a LC oferece a possibilidade de investigar uma grande quantidade de dados por meio eletrônico (WordSmith Tools, Scott, 2006), assegura precisão na apresentação das informações, e também mostra dados não detectados a olho nu pelo analista. Dessa forma, esta pesquisa apresenta um estudo dirigido pelo corpus embasado na lista de palavras-chave que detectou nigger(s) como a palavra mais relevante. A partir desse dado, delineou-se o objetivo geral do estudo que é verificar a importância que o termo nigger(s) assume na caracterização dos negros em Huckleberry Finn por meio do discurso racial, investigando o campo semântico racismo/escravidão. Para tanto, julgou-se necessário buscar na literatura de língua inglesa obras do século XIX (nove narrativas sobre escravos) que também empregaram o termo nigger(s), a fim de comparar as narrativas e a obra de Twain e verificar (des)semelhanças na construção do discurso racial. Por ser nigger um termo culturalmente marcado e os tradutores brasileiros o traduzirem por um vocábulo neutro (negro ou escravo), decidiu-se investigar obras brasileiras do século XIX (em número de seis) sobre a escravidão, a fim de entender a (não) existência de um vocábulo que se aproxime da carga semântica de nigger, com o intuito de confrontar os termos usados pelos autores brasileiros com aqueles usados pelos tradutores. Assim sendo, a tese a ser demonstrada é que Huckleberry Finn, embora use nigger(s) reiteradamente, caracteriza os negros de forma positiva, subvertendo o discurso racial, e emprega nigger(s) com o fim de mostrar como a sociedade estadunidense do século XIX tratava os negros de forma negativa. As obras brasileiras analisadas revelaram um termo para representar os negros, crioulo, cuja prosódia é negativa; porém os tradutores não fazem uso desse termo, possivelmente pelo fato de as normas do nosso Polissistema Literário, ligadas ao grau de aceitabilidade (TOURY, 1995) da tradução, imporem uma reescritura consoante com o discurso politicamente correto de nossos dias. Esta tese ainda tem o papel de mostrar a contribuição inestimável da LC para os estudos literários, uma vez que foi possível, por meio das linhas de concordância, apresentar análises impraticáveis de serem realizadas sem tal metodologia, em função da exiguidade do tempo da pesquisa (quatro anos), do número de obras analisadas (vinte) e do recorte escolhido, o campo semântico, difícil de ser investigado a olho nu. / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), written by Mark Twain (1835-1910), has been frequently in the spotlight. Since it was published, the prohibition to use the book imposed on libraries and schools has been caused by the issues Twain addressed, the dialects he created and his repeated use of the word nigger(s).The translations of Huckleberry Finn have been part of Brazils Translation Literary Polysystem since 1934, when a Portuguese version was published by Monteiro Lobato. Given that Mark Twains work came out more than one hundred years ago, many people have dedicated themselves to studying it in order to discuss its main controversial topics. The purpose of our research is to propose a different manner of analyzing Huckleberry Finns data and four of its translations into Portuguese. To that end, we have chosen Corpus Linguistics (CL) as our work methodology and main approach, because it offers the possibility of investigating a large amount of data by electronic tools (WordSmith Tools, Scott, 2006) which ensures the accuracy of the information presented by the analyst and shows data not detected with the naked eye. Therefore, this research consists of a corpus-driven study grounded in a list of key words, which revealed that the most relevant word was nigger(s) These data have allowed us to set the overall purpose of the study, namely to find out the importance of the word nigger(s) for Mark Twains depiction of the Black characters of Huckleberry Finn in his racial discourse, through our exploration of the racism/slavery semantic field. For that purpose, we found it necessary to search for works in English Literature written in the 19th century (nine narratives on slaves) that also used the word nigger(s). The purpose was to compare those narratives with Twains novel and check for similarities and differences in their construction of racial discourse. Because nigger is a culturally marked word and Brazilian translators use a neuter word to translate it (negro or escravo) we decided to dig into Brazilian works on slavery written in the 19th century (six of them) in order to understand the (in)existence of a word whose semantic content approximates that of the word nigger and to contrast the words used by Brazilian authors against those used by translators. The Brazilian works that we analyzed have revealed a word used to depict Black people, crioulo, which has a negative prosody; however, translators do not use this word, maybe because the standards of Brazils Literary Polysystem, linked to the translations level of acceptability (TOURY, 1995) impose a rewriting in tune with the current politically correct discourse. This PhD dissertation also aims at showing the remarkable contribution of Corpus Linguistics to literary studies, given that concordance lines have allowed us to carry out analyses that would have been impossible if this methodology had not been applied, considering the little time we had for conducting the research (four years), the number of literary works we examined (twenty) and the semantic field, which cannot be investigated with the naked eye.

The portrayals of mothers and fathers in children's literature as companions, disciplinarians, caregivers, nurturers, and providers were documented in this research. The impact of time of publication, sex of author, award-winning status of book, best-selling status of book, race of characters, and sex of characters upon each of the five parental roles was assessed using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation, and multinomial logistic regression techniques. A survey instrument developed for this study was completed for each of the 300 books randomly selected from the list of easy/picture books in the Children's Catalog (H.W. Wilson Company, 2001). To ensure all time periods were represented, the list was stratified by decades before sampling. It was expected that parental role portrayals would become more egalitarian and less traditional in each successive time period of publication. Male authors were expected to portray more egalitarian parental roles, and the race and sex of the young characters were not expected to influence parental portrayals. Award-winning books were expected to represent more egalitarian parental roles. Books that achieved the Publisher's Weekly all-time best-selling status were expected to portray parents in less egalitarian roles. Secondary analyses explored the prevalence of mothers' occupations, parental incompetence, and dangerous, solo child adventures. While the time of publication affected role portrayals, the evidence was unclear as to whether the changing roles represented greater egalitarianism. The race and the sex of the young characters significantly affected parental role portrayals, but the sex of the author did not influence these portrayals. While award winning and bestselling texts portrayed parents differently than books that did not achieve such honors, most did not provide enough information to adequately assess parenting roles. Half of the mothers who worked in the texts worked in conjunction with their husbands rather than independent of them. Over 10 % of mothers and fathers acted incompetently. The time of publication and the sex of the author was associated with the prevalence of solo, dangerous, child adventures. Subsequent implications and recommendations suggest the inclusion of stronger parental characters in children's books. Many of the parents are portrayed as inactive, incompetent, or neglectful. The concern is that children are exposed to these picture book portrayals during the primary years of identity acquisition.