The development of the novel cannot be separated from discussions about literary history, gender relations, performance, and the power literature has to instruct its audience. Women and young people have always comprised a substantial part of the novel’s readership, and this makes them powerful. The history of the novel is the history of dangerous literature; it is the history of works that have enchanted readers with “the power of example,” as Samuel Johnson wrote in the eighteenth century, that can lead them to change their behavior. This thesis explores how women in young adult literature—in the eighteenth century through Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and today through Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008)—use performance and vision to reveal and resist the social systems that try to define them. Evelina and Katniss, the heroines of these novels, provide their readers with examples of behaving in ways different than the normative model. Their stories, and the young women who read their stories, threaten the established social order of their worlds. The creative addition to this thesis provides readers with another young heroine who uses her powers, in a fantastical world, to reveal and resist the structures in her life.

This dissertation follows the development of the mentor figure from Frances Burney’s Evelina published in 1778 to Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda in 1801. The mentor becomes a key figure for exploring women’s revolutionary ideas on female education and women’s roles in society. My dissertation contributes to discussions on mentoring, development of the Gothic mode, and debates over sensibility and sentimental fiction. It considers how the female mentee paradoxically both desires and criticizes her male mentor and his authority. Each author under discussion employed the mentor figure in a way that addressed their contemporary society’s issues and prejudices toward the treatment of women and the power of sensibility. Much of this treatment was traced to a conversation of reforming female education from an accomplishment-based pedagogy to a moral, intellectual-based instruction that was more masculine in nature (emphasizing a balance between sensibility and reason). Frequently, the mentor provides general comments and recommendations about love to his female pupil, who is entering into the marriage market, but his advice often turns out to be wrong or misplaced since it does not fit the actual situation. He is a good spiritual guide but a poor romantic advisor. I assert that the mentor figure’s usual lack of romantic sentiment and his pupil’s ability to surpass him in matters of the heart reveal a tendency to subvert male authority. Throughout this discussion, questions related to gender arise. Women’s desire for their own agency and control over both their minds and bodies underpin much of women’s eighteenth-century fiction. My dissertation explores these complex relationships between male mentors and their female pupils.

Accusations and persecution of witchcraft have been embedded in global culture for centuries. For as long as these persecutions have occurred, women have found themselves accused most frequently. Older women with herbal knowledge were often called on to assist with childbirth or termination of pregnancies and this “secret knowledge” often led them to be suspected of supernatural abilities, often of a satanic nature. Intrigued by these wise women who appeared to have mysterious powers and a penchant for arousing the ire of men in the legal, medical, and religious communities, I began to notice their frequent appearance in novels. Does the presence of actual or perceived magic serve to improve the women’s status in their community? I reviewed several examples of YA literature, two picture books, and four Toni Morrison novels to determine if magic, conjuring, and witchcraft were more powerful threats than sexism and racism.

The focus of this thesis is my translation of Le livre qui t'explique enfin tout sur les parents by Françoize Boucher from French into English. Chapter one begins with a brief history and definition of children’s literature, as well as children’s literature in translation. I discuss the subgenre of informational picturebooks—its objectives, characteristics, and current trends. What follows is a short biographic and bibliographic sketch of Françoize Boucher. Then, I discuss the content, format, style, and illustrations of Le livre qui t'explique as well as examine the work’s audience, aims, and values. Finally, I discuss my English translation of the work—providing an overview of the translation strategies and methodologies that I used. Chapter two focuses on specific challenges encountered during the translation process. The chapter begins with the challenge of translating culturally significant topics such as French cultural references, brands, slang, and metric measurements. Then, I discuss the translation of linguistically bound terms such as wordplay, the use of English in a French text, and onomatopoeia. Finally, I discuss the translation of taboo subjects. Chapter three is my complete English-language translation: The Book That Finally Explains About Your Parents.

The study of young adult literature has become widespread within Children’s and Young Adult Literature specifically and literary studies as a whole. However, the term “young adult” which defines and focalizes both the literature itself and the ostensible readers for whom it is produced remains a poorly-examined area. The present study examines the creation of one branch of what we now call “young adult literature” from its roots in the United States in the early twentieth century to its emergence as a dominant literary form in the mid-to-late 1960s. In doing so, it seeks to reconcile emerging professional, psychological, sociological, pedagogical, cultural, and ideological discourses concerning adolescence and young adulthood with works of fiction prepared specifically for their consumption. It also seeks to position the changing role of adolescent subjects into the larger framework of American Studies by examining how these texts reflected, tested, and reinforced dominant paradigms of thought surrounding how adolescents would become actualized American subjects. At the same time, it broaches concerns within these dominant paradigms that have been overlooked in constructing historical approaches to the development of young adult literature, and it suggests a few methodologies by which to recover these undiscussed threads.

Uppsatsen behandlar översättningen av de fem första kapitlen i Rapt à Bamako, som är ett autentiskt översättningsuppdrag och som kommer att publiceras av Bokförlaget Trasten under hösten 2010. En översättningsprincip för det aktuella uppdraget har bestämts utifrån översättningens förutsättningar, bestående av teoretisk bakgrund, måltextens syfte och kontext, genomgång av referenstexter samt en stilstudie av källtexten. Det framkommer att den kontextuella och lexikala nivån var de som gav upphov till mest svårigheter under översättningsarbetet, men att en stor del av de problematiska översättningsfrågorna kunde lösas med hjälp av översättningsprincipen i fråga. / The study deals with the translation of the five first chapters of Rapt à Bamako, an authentic translation assignment which will be published by Bokförlaget Trasten during fall of 2010. Based on relevant theoretical considerations, the purpose and context of the source text, a survey of parallel texts and finally a style analysis, a translation strategy for the task was formulated. The contextual and lexical levels of the translation turned out to be the most problematic ones, but the solution to the problem could often be found in the translation strategy.

Analyzing Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and linking trends of the Byronic hero that have merged into a variety of genres reveal that the hero is a mode of subversive gender expression, which has evolved within the Gothic through feminine desire. Delving into Bram Stoker’s Dracula will provide unique insight into the audience’s desires/expressions of gender. Finding the transition point from the monster vampire of Dracula to Stephanie Meyer’s desirous, sparkling boy-next-door in Twilight will track the trajectory of gender and sexual norms through time. From the foundational adaptation of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights to the repressed vampiric desire of Dracula, to queer desire/domestication within Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, ending with sparkling vampires of Twilight, we can invite the Byronic hero, which already supports rejection of societal expectations, into a genderless space, becoming a champion of desire absent from the constraints of gender and sexuality conformity.

The intent of this thesis was to test the feasibility of constructing performance-for-development narrative using a constructive logic approach. I created an equation which expressed the sum of non-human-elements as the sum of a narrative with each element serving as a variable. I used a review of persuasion literature to provide insight into the selection and manipulation of each variable. I provided my family as a hypothetical example and used my knowledge of their preferences and communication styles in conjunction with the literature and the equation to craft a narrative which might increase pro-school attitudes in other families like my own. I found that there exists a narrative comprised of only non-human elements that are likely to yield change in an audience given a specific situation, and that a constructive logic approach can be used to craft performance-for-development narrative.

This thesis seeks to explore the related research literature surrounding representations and portrayals of protagonists of various multicultural backgrounds in series or transitional books. As teachers, it is essential to acknowledge the lack of multicultural characters in children's literature among elementary classroom bookshelves and learn how to incorporate literature featuring strong main characters of varying races and ethnicities so that children can see role models who mirror their own contexts. Prior studies, such as Gangi (2008) and Green and Hopenwasser (2017) have examined the deficiency of multicultural literature in the classroom, particularly among transitional stories, which shows the importance of exploring this topic. Furthermore, Green and Hopenwasser (2017) emphasize the importance of equal representation of transitional books with characters of diverse ethnicities, as they act as "mirrors and windows" for students to reflect upon themselves. These studies argue that to prevent the "whitewashing" of literature for primary grades, teachers should be cautious while choosing series or transitional books. I conducted an equity audit on three series or transitional books from different time periods, commonly found among elementary classroom libraries to explore ethnic and racial representations of protagonists to the actual demographics of the third-grade student population. Administering this equity audit also determined that popular series or transitional books are advantageous to include in classroom libraries when protagonists are portrayed as non-stereotypical experiencing real-life situations. The findings of this equity audit have the potential for educators to improve their methods choosing literature with characters of diverse races and ethnicities and improve methods of integrating multicultural literature into lessons.

Set in an imagined pre-colonial/ medieval southern African kingdom, A Smoke that Thunders or Godtouched is an epic fantasy novel that tracks the lives of three magical Black girls taking on the gods and the patriarchy.