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This essay will examine gothic traits in young adult and children's fantasy, specifically the fantasy series Septimus Heap (2005-2013) by Angie Sage. In order to get a better overview of the material i will be looking at the series as a whole and from there examining the parts i find relevant.  The basis of my analysis will be the gothic traits identified by Fred Botting in Gothic (2013) and a close reading of Septimus Heap (2005-2013). My analysis will be divided in to categories based on these gothic traits, and sub-categories based on what parts of the source material I am discussing. I conclude that several gothic traits, as defined by Botting, are present and recurring in Septimus Heap (2005-2013) but that aspects of these may sometimes differ from Bottings description of the classic gothic traits.

This thesis project involves the translation of a selection of short stories by Camille Deslauriers, a Québécois writer, from French into English, as well as the translation of a selection of short stories by Angie Abdou, a Western English-Canadian writer, from English into French. The thesis is divided into four chapters into which the translations have been inserted. The chapters provide an introduction and commentary to the translations. I begin by giving a brief overview of the importance of literary translation in Canada as well as a short description of Québécois and English-Canadian short fiction.This section introduces the two authors that have been chosen for this thesis, Camille Deslauriers and Angie Abdou, as well as their collections of short stories, Femme-Boa and Anything Boys Can Do respectively. I discuss various approaches to translation, literary translation, linguistic issues, the translation process, and the issue of mother tongue and directionality. Following the two introductory chapters are the translations. I have translated nine of Camille Deslauriers' short stories from Femme-Boa from French into English, and three of Angie Abdou's short stories from Anything Boys Can Do from English into French. In both cases, these are the first translations to be done of these authors' works. I then go on to describe certain challenges posed by the translations, giving examples of strategies adopted to resolve the problems. In the final chapter, I reflect upon the translation process as a whole, in light of the revisions done by both of my thesis advisors, in terms of vocabulary, syntax, bilingualism, and biculturalism.This reflection enables me to synthesize the knowledge that I acquired through the whole translation experience.

Narratives of resisting the Trujillo regime are so prevalent in Dominican-American literature that it seems Dominican-American authors must write about Trujillo to be deemed authentically Dominican-American. Within these Trujillo narratives there seems to be two main ways to talk about resistance. “The resistance,” an organized entity that actively and consciously opposes the Trujillo regime, can be seen in stories like those told about the Mirabal sisters. The other resistance narrates how characters capitalize on opportunities to disrupt business or political functions, thus disrupting the Trujillo machine. This resistance works much like Ben Highmore's explanation of de Certeau's resistance in that “it limits flows and dissipates energies” (104). Characters from the socio-economic lower-class typically use this type of resistance because they are not recognized by nor allowed direct access to the regime. My thesis focuses on the latter type of resistance through my study of Angie Cruz's Let It Rain Coffee and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Both authors narrate instances of unrecognized resistance against Trujillo, but they also articulate modern resistance to economic, racial, and gender pressures, such as materialism and hyper-masculinity, through Trujillo narratives. While these narratives create a space for Dominican-Americans of different gender, class, and race, they also create Trujillo as a marker of Dominican literature, perpetuating the idea of Trujillo as inextricably connected to Dominican identity and obfuscating more complex issues of race and gender in Dominican culture.

In the wake of the guilty verdict of George Floyd’s murderer, police officer Derek Chauvin, there is hope for change in the pattern of police brutality against black people in the United States. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas was published three years prior to George Floyd’s death, in 2017, and is a realistic fictional novel in the young adult genre that has gained attention for its relevant contribution in the debate of racism and police violence, as the fictional victim Khalil Harris, an unarmed black teenager, does not receive the same justice as George Floyd. In this essay, reader response to The Hate U Give is analysed in order to examine how it affects the opinions and worldview of the reader during and after the read. A close reading and analysis of pivotal scenes was carried out using affective stylistics, in order to interpret what the text does to the reader word-by-word, and subsequently the reader’s creation of meaning was examined and discussed. The reader’s response was then analysed with Stanley Fish’s theoretical framework of interpretive communities, groups with shared social norms and worldviews, which dictate how individuals create meaning in the first place. The analysis suggests that readers of The Hate U Give, while starting out in different, albeit to a certain extent similar, interpretive communities, will gradually align themselves with the interpretive community of Black Lives Matter through shared ideas and opinions and the increased understanding they develop when they read the novel.

The aim of this thesis is two-fold. Firstly, the aim is to analyze the three aspects institutional racism, double-consciousness and importance of minoritized voices in Angie Thomas’ novel The Hate U Give in connection to the thesis’ theoretical framework, Critical Race Theory. Secondly, the aim is also to argue for the inclusion of The Hate U Give in the Swedish EFL classroom, by investigating potential pedagogical implications in connection to the literary analysis and the thesis’ pedagogical framework, Critical Race Pedagogy. Potentially as a way of hoping for social justice and change for a minoritized group of people, the literary analysis of the three aspects demonstrates that Thomas depicts racial inequality as natural and fixed within many layers of American society such as economic opportunities, law enforcement, education, identities and which voices are heard vs. ignored. Therefore, this thesis argues that Thomas’ counter narrative The Hate U Give, with its portrayal of the racially inequal American society and the effects on the African American characters, could serve as a point of departure for discussions of institutional racism, double-consciousness and the importance of minoritized voices in the Swedish EFL classroom, to raise awareness of the situation for a minoritized group of people in America and connect it to the students’ own experiences and knowledge of these aspects.

This thesis examines the connection between Dominican history, the influence of American material culture, and the mythic American Dream as catalysts for migration. The two U.S. occupations and American propaganda through media had a great effect on the deceptive perception of an American life as an effortless method for attaining wealth. Let it Rain Coffee by Angie Cruz, will focus on the character, Esperanza Colon, and her obsession with the lavish lifestyle she views on the television show, Dallas. Material objects, as argued by Daniel Miller in his book, Stuff, work in subtle yet significant ways and determine our function, identification, and experience in society. If the ideal purpose of material culture is to presuppose our roles as individuals, one can conclude that the novel showcases the issues of a subordinate class struggling to attain the material goods that represent economic wealth while maintaining a sense of self-identification and self-agency.

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This dissertation explores the social relations of indebtedness. In this project I read Latinx and Latin American texts not often placed in conversation—Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra, Carlos Fuentes’ La Frontera de Cristal, Rosario Ferré’s Maldito Amor, and Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee—and explore their thematic and formal engagements with debt. I consider the problem of the visibility, representation, and understanding of indebtedness and argue that, to engage with the invisible logic of debt requires engaging the formal logic—the temporal, narratological, and rhetorical features—of the text. Each chapter treats each of these texts as a case study, and analyzes a different historical context and a different form and scale of debt—from the individual and informal in Rivera’s text to the sovereign and neocolonial in Ferré’s. Unlike other scholars who read for representations of high finance, the stock market, and debt relations, I read texts where questions of credit, finance, and the market are represented in subtle ways, attending to how the ideologies that precede debt are negotiated in the intimate spaces of the home and the family. I ask questions like what kind of ideas about the American Dream, family sacrifice, and national progress prop up debt regimes or what ideas about national progress justify sovereign debt to understand the generation and maintenance of an indebted subjectivity, not merely on an institutional and abstract level, but from below. Reading for debt’s logic is not an attempt to expose the latent ideology of the text or how it mimetically reflects reality but rather to show how the text’s critical engagement of related ideologies—those of progress, development, and liberalism—also encode questions related to credit, debt, risk, and loss. The texts I bring together offer a certain comparative, theoretical, and historical value in foregrounding narrative’s ability to generate relationships of debt and expose the literary techniques deployed to conceal debt’s logic. I show how attending to debt in these texts reframe struggles that tend to be thought of in spatial terms—displacement, migration, expropriation, extraction—and help us see them in temporal ones. Unlike engagements of finance and indebtedness that focus on its asocial and alienating qualities, I show how these texts render visible the deeply intimate nature of indebtedness and how debt mechanisms both produce and are produced by social relationships. Throughout the project, I argue that the relations of intimacy—the stories told that produce closeness, the care from which value is extracted for the production of profit, and the relations created between the debtor and the creditor—are the necessary conditions for contemporary debt and finance across the Americas.