This thesis suggests that the idea of the rhetorical situation-a work's text (or language), author, audience, and social context-can serve as a connection between literature, literary theory, and composition studies. Criticisms of Emily Dickinson's Poem 754 are presented, and each is categorized according to the element of the rhetorical situation upon which it focuses.

Anne Brontë died in 1848, having written two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Although these novels, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, initially received a favourable critical response, the unsympathetic remarks of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell initiated a dismissive attitude towards Anne Brontë’s work. For over a hundred years, she was marginalized and silenced by a critical world that admired and respected the work of her two sisters, Charlotte and Emily, but that refused to acknowledge the substantial merits of her own fiction. However, in 1959 revisionist scholars such as Derek Stanford, Ada Harrison and Winifred Gérin, offered important, more enlightened readings that helped to liberate Brontë scholarship from the old conservatisms and to direct it into new directions. Since then, her fiction has been the focus of a robust, but still incomplete, revisionist critical scholarship. My work too is revisionist in orientation, and seeks to position itself within this revisionist approach. It has a double focus that appraises both Brontë’s social commentary and her narratology. It thus integrates two principal areas of enquiry: firstly, an investigation into how Brontë interrogates the position of middle class women in their society, and secondly, an examination of how that interrogation is conveyed by her creative deployment of narrative techniques, especially by her awareness of the rich potential of the first person narrative voice. Chapter 1 looks at the critical response to Brontë’s fiction from 1847 to the present, and shows how the revisionist readings of 1959 were pivotal in re-invigorating the critical approach to her work. Chapter 2 contextualizes the key legal, social, and economic consequences of Victorian patriarchy that so angered and frustrated feminist thinkers and writers such as Brontë. The chapter also demonstrates the extent to which a number of her core concerns relating to Victorian society and the status of women are reflected in her work. In Chapter 3 I discuss three important biographical influences on Brontë: her family, her painful experiences as a governess, and her reading history. Chapter 4 contains a detailed analysis of Agnes Grey, which includes an exploration of the narrative devices that help to reinforce its core concerns. Chapter 5 focuses on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, showing how the novel offers a richer and more sophisticated analysis of feminist concerns than those that are explored in Agnes Grey. These are broadened to include an investigation of the lives of married women, particularly those trapped in abusive marriages. The chapter also stresses Brontë’s skilful deployment of an intricate and layered narrative technique. The conclusion points to the ways in which my study participates in and extends the current revisionist trend and suggests some aspects of Brontë’s work that would reward further critical attention. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / English / Unrestricted

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This essay explores a broad range of literary works that treat long-term grief as a natural response to the death of a child. Literary examples show gaps in the medical and social sciences’ considerations of grief, since these disciplines judge bereaved mothers’ grief as excessive or label it bereavement disorder. By contrast, authors who employ the ancient storyline of child death illuminate maternal grieving practices, which are commonly marked with a vigilance that expresses itself in wildness. Many of these authors treat grief as a forced pilgrimage, but question the possibility of returning to a previous state of psychological balance. Instead, the mothers in their stories and poems resist external pressure for closure and silence and favor lasting memory. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Emily Dickinson, in letters to bereaved mother Susan Gilbert Dickinson and in the poetry included in these letters, represent maternal child loss as compelling a movement into a new state and emphasize the lasting pain and disruption of this loss.

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Le projet de création Le chasseur inconnu est un roman dont la narration problématique – au nous – constitue la principale particularité. Campé dans un village non identifié dont les habitants se réunissent chaque semaine pour débattre de leurs problèmes et pour potiner, ce texte de fiction se déploie grâce aux voix de narrateurs mystérieux et à leur ton parfois aux limites de l’absurde. L’essai réflexif qui suit le roman propose une étude des enjeux et des effets de la narration au nous dans la nouvelle Une rose pour Emily de William Faulkner. / The novel Le chasseur inconnu’s most defining characteristic is its narration ;  an unnatural we narration. The story takes place in an unknown town where villagers meet every week to discuss their problems and to gossip. As the plot unfolds, the mysterious narrators and their absurd voices become increasingly important and stress the narrative peculiarity of the novel. The essay following Le chasseur inconnu offers a study of we narration in William Faulkner’s short story A Rose for Emily.

This essay deals with the narrative structure of Emily Brontë’s 1847 Wuthering Heights. This famously dark and tumultuous novel has two narrators, the just-arrived country tenant Lockwood and Mrs. Dean, a housekeeper with a long story to tell. Mrs. Dean’s narrative is situated within and framed by Lockwood’s as he is the primary and she the secondary narrator. The concept of framing is of interest for this essay in several ways. Firstly, it considers how Lockwood as the intended recipient of Mrs. Dean’s narrative causes it to unfold the way it does, and secondly how both of their narratives combine to frame other characters in the novel, the most famous ones being Catherine and Heathcliff. The essay argues that both the narrators can be termed discordant, narrators who are “biased or confused” (Cohn 2000, 307) about the story they are telling. This is because they are similar in the way of wanting to suppress strong emotion while the characters whose lives they narrate, Heathcliff and Catherine, are strongly emotional characters. This causes the narration to remain distant from the subjects it concerns. Heathcliff and Catherine are further linked to two Romantic themes, personal authenticity in love and the high status of passion. Mrs. Dean in particular gives rise to Christian sentiments, and the essay finds a conflict between the Christian striving for a final end in the form of heaven and the Romantic high value placed on earthly striving in and of itself. It argues that the discordant narratory framing and dissimilarity of Heathcliff and Catherine to the narrators allow them to become more Romantic, and that the novel finally constitutes a love letter to the earth without God, with its abundance of human striving.  The essay uses narratological terminology adapted from Bal (2017) to describe different levels of narrative, namely narrative text, story, and fabula.

Denna uppsats redogör för och undersöker berättarperspektiv och maktrelationer i Emily Brontës roman Wuthering Heights. På vilket sätt läsaren tar del av romanens komplexa berättande, om det är samma berättare genom hela romanen eller om det skiftar, vilka maktrelationer som existerar mellan romangestalterna och förhållanden mellan makt och berättarperspektiv undersöks genom analys av verket.

This thesis is a study of the presentation of the orphan child in eighteenth and early nineteenth century English literature, and focuses on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It is concerned with assessing the extent to which the orphan children in each of the works are liberated from familial and social constraints and structures and to what end. Chapter One examines the major thematic concern of the extent to which the motif of the orphan child represents a wronged innocent, and whether this symbol can also, or alternatively, be presented as a revolutionary force that challenges society's status quo in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Chapter Two considers the significance of the child "lost" and "found", which forms the explicit subject of six of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and explores the treatment of these conditions, and their differences and consequences for the children concerned. Chapter Three focuses on Charlotte Bronte's depiction of the orphan in Jane Eyre, which presents two models of the orphan child: the protagonist Jane, and Helen Burns. The chapter examines these two models and their responses to orphan-hood in a hostile world where orphans are mistreated by family and society alike. Chapter Four determines whether the orphan constitutes a subversive threat to the family in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and also explores the notion that, although orphan-hood often entails liberation from adult guardians, it also comprises vulnerability and exposure. The thesis concludes by considering the extent to which orphan-hood can involve a form of liberation from the confines of social structures, and what this liberation constitutes for each of the three authors.