This thesis offers a feminist analysis of women and gender in the novels of Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Delphine Zanga Tsogo, Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, Mariama Ba, Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head. My analyses appropriate and rethink western feminist theories of gender and post-colonial literary theory. I maintain that the texts analyzed are also theoretical, since feminist theory is embedded in the polysemy of the texts themselves. The study demonstrates that identity and sexuality are not static sites of oppression for women. They are contesting terrains where the subversion of difference, and the construction of identity, subjectivity and sexuality, are interlocking issues. Women's positional perspectives and varying subject positions are shown to be their strengths.

It is commonly thought that New Zealand writers before World War II suffered from a "dual exile". In New Zealand, they were exiled far from the publishing opportunities and cultural stimulus of metropolitan centres. To succeed as writers they were forced to go overseas, where they endured a second kind of spiritual exile, far from home. They were required to give up their "New Zealandness" in order to achieve literary success, yet never completely belonged in the metropolitan centres to which they had gone. They thus became permanent exiles. This thesis aims to discover the true prevalence of "dual exile" amongst early twentieth-century New Zealand writers. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, it argues that the hypothesis of "dual exile" is a myth propagated since the 1930s by New Zealand‘s cultural nationalist tradition. New Zealand writers were not exiles because of the existence of the "colonial writing world"—a system of cultural diffusion, literary networks and personal interactions that gave writers access to all the cultural capital of Britain through lines of communication established by colonial expansion. Those who went to Britain remained connected to New Zealand through these same networks. The existence of the colonial writing world meant that the physical location of the writer, whether in New Zealand or overseas, had far less impact on literary success than the cultural nationalists assumed.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of the prewriting activities of class discussion and paired-student-interaction on the voluntary writing decisions of fourth graders. The sample consisted of 355 subjects: 185 males and 170 females. All subjects were fourth graders and attended seven Schools randomly selected from all elementary schools in a midwestern city school system.Class discussion, paired-student-interaction, and a control condition of no prewriting experience formed the three levels of the independent variable. The dependent variable consisted of whether or -riot the subject chose to participate in a writing activity. Grade level placement, time of clay, writing stimulus, and length of prewriting activity were control variables. Subjects were randomly assigned to the three treatment groups.The chi-square (x2) test statistic for equality of three proportions was used to test each of the following null hypotheses at the .05 level of significance.H01: There is no statistically significant difference among the three proportionsH02: of subjects choosing the writing activity corresponding co the three treatment groups for the male subjects. There is no statistically significant difference among the three proportions cf subjects choosing the writing activity corresponding to the three treatment groups for the female subjects.Ho1 was not rejected. There was no significant difference among the proportions of males choosing to write from the three treatment groups. H02 was rejected (P<-05). Post hoc analyses comparing pairs of proportions for the female subjects indicated a significant difference between_ the class discussion treatment and the control condition. The proportion of girls in the Control Group choosing to write was significantly larger than the proportion of girls in the Class Discussion Group choosing to write.These results suggest that:1. Oral language prewriting experiences have a differential effect on the willingness and females to write.2. Class discussion and paired-student-interaction do not have an effect on the writing decisions of fourth grade boys.3. Class discussion has a negative effect on the willingness of fourth grade girls to write.

This thesis is an exploration of Irish literary emigration to London in the nineteenth century, with particular reference to the 1880s and 1890s. These two decades witnessed a conflict between two generations of Irish emigrant writers and it is this conflict which forms the basis of the thesis. On the one hand were those emigrants - T.P. O'Connor, Justin McCarthy and R. Barry O'Brien - who typified the Irish literary defection to London in the nineteenth century, moving to England for a mixture of political, social, economic and cultural reasons. They were nationalists, but, like most Irish literary emigrants before them, they integrated themselves with British political and cultural life, developing a 'mixed' political-cultural identity in which British elements - principally Liberalism - were at play as well as Irish ones. By the 1880s they were well established in the world of Liberal London and played a prominent role in the Liberal Home Rule campaign of 1886-92. In these years, however, a new generation of Irish literary emigrants arrived in London - men like W.P. Ryan and D.P. Moran - and they were to be influenced by the Irish cultural revival rather than British Liberalism, becoming involved in the Southwark Irish Literary Club, the Irish Literary Society and the London Gaelic League during the 1880s and 1890s. Coming into contact with the 'Home Rule' writers, this 'Revival' generation would see their forerunners, with their 'mixed' identities, as Irishmen who had compromised culturally, who were essentially Anglicised. These cultural 'warnings' helped stimulate the cultural nationalism of the younger men, who, in the early 1900s, rejected the example of the 'Home Rule' generation and the longstanding pattern of cultural assimilation that they represented, by returning to Ireland and working for the Gaelic revival there. In doing so they illustrated the contrasting ways in which emigration to London could affect Irish litterateurs in the late nineteenth century.

This thesis consists of a commentary on Jerome, Letters 1, 60, and 107, literary pieces which readily lend themselves to a study of aspects of Jerome's art by the narratio method, and bear witness to his position as a Christian writer with roots in the Classical tradition. It is thus essentially a literary commentary, though matters of text, language, history, theology, and Scriptural exegesis are also discussed where they are of special interest or where such discussion helps to illuminate particular passages. The commentary on each letter is prefaced by an introduction setting out the background, considering the letter as a whole, and indicating the main themes and other points of importance. A general introduction briefly dicusses the text and the manuscripts, the readership of the letters, prose-rhythm as a feature of Jerome's style, Jerome's work on the Latin Bible and his citations from it, and his familiarity with and use of Classical literature.

No description available.

This masters thesis in creative writing is comprised of two sections, a critical review of contemporary love stories written by women in the narrative mode and a novel entitled Si tes reves m'etaient contes. / In our study of Le recit amoureux feminin actuel, we attempt to explain women's preference for the narrative mode, to describe the new vocabulary of love and highlight its specific meaning and style. How do women write about love, how do they portray men, what have become their amorous preoccupations in the recent years? / Si tes reves m'etaient contes is the story of Catherine who, fast approaching her forties, reflects upon her life and her marriage. She is forced to conclude that her husband, whom she thought she knew so intimately, is no longer the man she married. He has become a stranger to her.

No description available.

This creative practice-led thesis is in two parts - a novella entitled Leaning into the Light and an exegesis dealing with issues for creative writers who are non-Indigenous engaging with Indigenous characters and inter-cultural relationships. The novella is based on a woman's tale of a cross cultural friendship and is set in a Queensland Cape York Aboriginal community over a period of fifteen years. Leaning into the Light is for the most part set in the late 1960s, and as such tracks some of the social and personal cost of colonisation through its depiction of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships within a Christian run mission. In short, Leaning into the Light creates an imaginary space of intercultural relationships that is nevertheless grounded in a particular experience of a 'real' place and time where Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjectivities collide and communicate. The exegesis is principally concerned with issues of non-Indigenous representation of indigeneity, an area of enquiry and scholarship that is being increasingly theorized and debated in contemporary cultural and literary studies. In this field, two questions raised by Fee (in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995) are key concerns in the exegesis. How do we determine who is a member of the Aboriginal minority group, and can majority members speak for this minority? The intensification of interest around these issues follows a period of debate in the 1990s which in turn was spawned by the &quotunprecedented politicisation of {Australian} history" (Collins and Davis, 2004, p.5) following the important Mabo decision which overturned the &quotnation's founding doctrine of terra nullius" (ibid, p.2). These debates questioned whether or not non-Aboriginal authors could legitimately include Aboriginal themes and characters in their work (Huggins, 1994; Wheatley, 1994, Griffiths, et al in Tiffin and Lawson, 1994), and covered important political and ethical considerations, at the heart of which were issues of representation and authenticity. Moreover, there were concerns about non-Indigenous authors competing for important symbolic and publishing space with Indigenous authors. In the writing of Leaning into the Light, these issues became pivotal to the representation of character and situation and as such constitute the key points of analysis in the exegesis.