In recent years a number of important studies have emerged that focus on the lives of the human agents who operated in the early-modern book trade. This marks a scholarly shift away from the technologies of book production towards the figures who operated, profited from, and helped to shape, print technologies and their related products. In this critical movement the identities of printers, publishers, and booksellers have come to matter, both in terms of our understanding of what constitutes ‘print culture,’ and in efforts to narrativise the history of the book. However, although scholars have become increasingly familiar with a critical vocabulary that links early-modern print with textual transience, and the archive with paradigms associated with absence, disputation, and authenticity, biographies related to the lives of book-trade professionals have tended to privilege the representational stability of the documentary evidence we use to reconstruct past lives. This thesis aims to address this critical vacuum by analysing the life and career of one highly controversial, although critically neglected, 17th-century printer, Henry Hills (c. 1625-1688/9). By drawing together methodologies associated with bibliography, the history of the book, and the study of literatures, the thesis seeks to self-reflexively respond to the absences, doublings, missing or fabricated texts, revisions, accretions, and amendments that seem to mark, and have come to shape, the story of Hills’ life. Theories and approaches associated with the materiality of early-modern lives, critical biography, and the archive are used to fully explore the way Hills functioned both in his own time and after as a metonymic figure who has been actively written and rewritten with different historically specific agendas in mind. Ideas of elusiveness, how his contemporaries struggled to represent Hills, and the problem of locating him in the documentary evidence, are also investigated. In the process this thesis casts new light not only on Hills but on the 17th-century printing trade and the printer as a cultural emblem, 17th-century history and culture, and the way we research lives in the early modern period. Each of the chapters of this thesis discusses archival sources that critical biography and bibliography have traditionally looked to for biographical details of Hills’ life. These include a Particular Baptist confession-cum-conversion account entitled The Prodigal Returned, said to have been composed by Hills in 1651 while he served a prison sentence in the Fleet for adultery. I also discuss three accounts of Hills’ high-profile conversion to Catholicism in the mid-1680s, which were authored between 1684 and 1733. The thesis provides a detailed analysis of a conspiracy story, first published in 1697, which posthumously cast Hills as a key player in a bibliographical scandal that is said to have taken place in 1649. I also pay close attention to Hills’ last will and testament, a document that spawned a number of very public legal contestations amongst members of the Hills family. Through a close, historicised reading of these materials, this thesis adds new discussions of the way in which Hills was read and contested by his contemporaries, later historians, and bibliographers, and throughout I retain a sense of the highly mediated nature of the evidence we use to reconstruct Hills biographically, while stressing his importance in the cultural imagination of the period.

PhD thesis - School of Education - Faculty of Humanities / In an attempt to add the voices of African feminist educators to the narrative field, and to address the critique that feminist discourses have generally been couched in theoretical abstraction, this study, which was conducted with five university women educators from various parts of Southern Africa, explores the enactment of feminist pedagogies in English language classrooms. The study was guided by the principles of feminist research methodologies, which advocate sensitivity to the subjective, emotional and biographic factors that shape the researcher and researched. Drawing from a suite of data sources, which comprised autobiographical and biographical narratives, lecture observations and interviews the study explores how the social variables of race, class, gender, politics, religion, etc. have influenced the participants’ feminist and language identity formation, and by extension how these inform their teaching of English from a feminist perspective, in terms of What they teach; How they teach, and Why they teach the curriculum content that they do. Taking the view that the personal is political and potentially pedagogical, the study provides a cursory commentary on the participants’ childhood and early adulthood, with the intention of exploring the potential a retrospective gaze of their identity formation has in terms of how they frame interpersonal relations with students and colleagues, and the enactment of their teaching identities. Identifying for more nuanced investigation the study tracks the trajectories of the participants’ coming to feminist consciousness, with a special focus on their adoption of project identities which they enact through their theorizing and teaching of English from a feminist perspective. Given their subscription and investment in narratives of emancipation that subvert social injustices and repressive domination, the study explores, at length, the complexities of feminist teacher identity in relation to the themes of difference, dialogue, and epistemologies of experience, all of which invariably encompass the overarching theme of feminist teacher authority. Acknowledging the slippery terrain of teacher and student identity calibrations, the study differentiates three ways in which authority is generally conceived of in feminist pedagogy, viz. authority versus nurturance, authority as authorship, and authority as power. In discussing the authority versus nurturance I argue for unhinging the female teacher from traditional associations of her with care-giver and intellectualised mammy. Urging for recognition of the woman teacher as female but non-maternal, I argue for a recontextualised and reconceptualised understanding of the female teacher – one that foregrounds her capability of offering critical intellectual nurturance. In exploring the delineation authority as authorship, which entails the mutual sharing of teacher-student personal experience in relation to broader public and academic discourses, the study cautions against the potential for personal epistemology to circulate within the realm of the familiar, narcissistic and sentimental, in the absence of meaningful critical and contextual pedagogic and educative relevance. In this regard, I suggest the consideration of two pertinent questions: viz. i) is there a shared assumption that the personal is good and the impersonal bad? and ii) given that other discourses of the personal are operating in the feminist classroom, exactly which personal are we referring to when we seek to validate the epistemology of experience? I argue that the pedagogic and educative worth of both teacher and students’ personal disclosures need to be subject to critical, analytical, and productive reflection to assess their value as knowledge. Critiquing enclaves of feminist pedagogical scholarship that suggest divesting the classroom of teacher authority as a way of rendering it more democratic, the discussion on authority as power agitates for an unmasking of the inevitable pedagogic and educative authority that the feminist teacher wields in the classroom. Through empirical evidence it illustrates variants of teacher authority that operate in the classroom and supports Gore’s (2002), proposition to develop a theory of pedagogy and power by acknowledging that: pedagogy is the enactment of power relations between teacher, student and other significant partners; bodies are the objects of pedagogical power relations, and in pedagogy, different differences matter; the kind of knowledge produced in pedagogy interacts with the institutional site and the techniques of power employed there; and pedagogy proceeds via a limited set of specific techniques of power. The study concludes with a theoretical and methodological reflective synthesis. The theoretical synthesis presents the central lines of argument that emerged from the issues investigated. The methodological reflective synthesis presents the participants’ comments on the validity of the study and the value that accrued to them by virtue of participating in the study.

As women began to establish themselves in the United States workforce in the first half of the twentieth century, one especial group of career women, women writers, began to use the space of their self-authored life writing narratives to inscribe their own understanding of themselves. Roundly criticized for not adhering to conventional autobiographical standards, these women writers used purposeful political strategies of resistance to craft self-authored life writing works that varied widely from the genre of autobiography. Rather than employ the usual ways critiquing autobiographical texts, I explore a deeper understanding of what these prescient women sought to do. Through revision of the terminology of the field and in consideration of a wide variety of critics and approaches, I argue that these women intentionally employed resistance in their writings. In Dust Tracks on A Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston successfully established her own sense of herself as a black woman, who could also comment on political issues. Her fellow Southerner, Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), used orality to deliberately showcase her view of her own life. Another Southern writer, Lillian Smith in Killers of the Dream, employed an overtly social science approach to tell the life narrative of all white Christian Southerners, and described how she felt the problems of racism should be overcome. Anzia Yezierska, a Russian émigré to the United States, used an Old World European understanding of storytelling to refashion an understanding of herself as a writer and at the same time critiqued the United States in her work, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). Mary Austin, a Western woman writer, saw Earth Horizon as an opportunity to reclaim the fragmentation of a woman’s life as a positive, rather than a negative space.

The following study compares and contrasts the ways three women writers craft narrative selves in their autobiographical texts. Each of the women, the Metis author Maria Campbell, the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and the Irish lyric poet Eavan Boland, calls on oral techniques to write her autobiography. The study examines how each of the women draws on the oral traditions of her mother-culture, subsequently using characters from culturally distinct mythologies to express her own growth as writer. The methodologies that inform this study are a combination of postcolonial theories about identity and language, and closely related feminist theories about power relations between women and colonialism and women and patriarchal power. Structuralist and feminist theories about mythologies, as well as analysis of the psychodynamics of orality have also influenced the analysis undertaken in this thesis.<p> The research conducted provides evidence that each woman writes a narrative self structured on the framework of the heroic, but infused with culturespecific heroic characters and characteristics from the mother-culture's oral traditions. Maria Campbell's Half-Breed shows distinctly oral influences both in its narrative structure and in its characters. For example, by comparing Maria's character to Wesakaychak's character from Nehiyawak Trickster cycles and other Native North American Trickster cycles, the study shows how Campbell's character resembles the character from oral tales. The Trickster, and consequently, Maria, destabilizes boundaries and unsettles domains of knowledge, therefore, questioning colonial and patriarchal discourses and imagery. In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston likewise battles limiting stereotypes held by both her Chinese-American community and the mainstream community she inhabits. The character Maxine imagines herself as both woman warrior and a warrior poet, characters she hears about from her mother, and in the process of chronicling her own training as a woman warrior, she also chronicles her training as a word warrior. Eavan Boland, in Object Lessons unsettles the conventions surrounding the hero-bard whose shadow falls over Irish lyric poetry. While she is marginalized in different ways than either Campbell or Kingston, she shares their desire to show women as active agents in their own lives. These writers show that foremothers exist in other storytelling traditions, even if the textual record does not reflect the influence that female storytellers have had on it. As the women (re)construct themselves in their autobiographies, they work within and against conventional Western heroics, building characters who enrich and redefine what it means to be heroic.

The following study compares and contrasts the ways three women writers craft narrative selves in their autobiographical texts. Each of the women, the Metis author Maria Campbell, the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and the Irish lyric poet Eavan Boland, calls on oral techniques to write her autobiography. The study examines how each of the women draws on the oral traditions of her mother-culture, subsequently using characters from culturally distinct mythologies to express her own growth as writer. The methodologies that inform this study are a combination of postcolonial theories about identity and language, and closely related feminist theories about power relations between women and colonialism and women and patriarchal power. Structuralist and feminist theories about mythologies, as well as analysis of the psychodynamics of orality have also influenced the analysis undertaken in this thesis.<p> The research conducted provides evidence that each woman writes a narrative self structured on the framework of the heroic, but infused with culturespecific heroic characters and characteristics from the mother-culture's oral traditions. Maria Campbell's Half-Breed shows distinctly oral influences both in its narrative structure and in its characters. For example, by comparing Maria's character to Wesakaychak's character from Nehiyawak Trickster cycles and other Native North American Trickster cycles, the study shows how Campbell's character resembles the character from oral tales. The Trickster, and consequently, Maria, destabilizes boundaries and unsettles domains of knowledge, therefore, questioning colonial and patriarchal discourses and imagery. In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston likewise battles limiting stereotypes held by both her Chinese-American community and the mainstream community she inhabits. The character Maxine imagines herself as both woman warrior and a warrior poet, characters she hears about from her mother, and in the process of chronicling her own training as a woman warrior, she also chronicles her training as a word warrior. Eavan Boland, in Object Lessons unsettles the conventions surrounding the hero-bard whose shadow falls over Irish lyric poetry. While she is marginalized in different ways than either Campbell or Kingston, she shares their desire to show women as active agents in their own lives. These writers show that foremothers exist in other storytelling traditions, even if the textual record does not reflect the influence that female storytellers have had on it. As the women (re)construct themselves in their autobiographies, they work within and against conventional Western heroics, building characters who enrich and redefine what it means to be heroic.