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Abstract   This thesis investigates the interactions between human and nonhuman characters that express a particular concern regarding nature and the environment in Oscar Wilde's four fairy tales in A House of Pomegranates. The author utilizes a significant number of nonhuman characters to communicate with humans, which is a fairy-tale convention in which truth wins over falsehood, kindness is rewarded, and virtue triumphs over evil. However, Wilde's stories move beyond the fairy tale convention based on their ecocritical and political viewpoints. Based on a close reading of the four tales in Wilde's book, the thesis argues that the involvement of nonhuman characters, and their participation in events with human figures, raises several ecocritical matters. It also contends that nonhuman characters display interest in guiding human characters in their transformational journeys to support them in understanding that they all share one Earth and must be concerned about all species, nature, and the environment. Finally, this study argues that nonhuman characters communicate and talk mostly for their and nature’s rights, but sometimes they represent Victorians’ society. The analysis highlights the depth of the ecocritical approaches and how they are expressed in the texts. In addition, the discussions shed light on Victorian ecocriticism, including some theories and ideas of Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism within animal studies and transformation, which complete the analysis.

This thesis explores the embodied experiences of the rural population in nineteenth-century France. The prevailing historiography has treated rural bodily culture as a cultural survival swept away by ‘modernisation’ in the nineteenth century. By turning to the lives and words of rural labourers and artisans from the Landes de Gascogne, the thesis questions this account, instead showing ways that popular cultures of the body were flexible traditions, adapted by individuals to meet new needs. It does so through a close focus on the stories, songs, and other oral traditions collected by Félix Arnaudin (1844-1921) in the Grande-Lande between around 1870 and 1914. The thesis focuses on the lives of a few of Arnaudin’s 759 folklore informants, showing both how their bodily experiences were changing during this period, and how songs and stories were creative interventions, designed to shape bodily possibilities from below. The thesis draws attention to the surprising shape of rural experiences of the body, which focused on body parts such as the legs and skin for reasons specific to everyday life, while largely ignoring issues that historians might have assumed would be important, such as religion. It argues that the ordinary men and women who performed stories and sang songs were active agents in constructing their own bodies in response to material conditions of physical illness and disability, as well as a changing environment, changing class relations, or changing sexual norms in the Grande-Lande. The thesis presents an emotional and experiential view of rural bodies with a sensitivity to the different experiences of men and women, young and old, poorer and richer, but emphasizes that the body must be seen in the round, as a unifying concern that links together issues of social class, environmental change, sexual relations, work, disability, and religion.

Thesis (MA (Modern Foreign Languages))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / It has been widely assumed that the portrayal of women in fairytales subscribes to somewhat outdated and stereotypical modes of representation. Upon closer inspection however, it can be seen that this is a fallacious assumption and that the female roles in these stories are much more multidimensional in nature. One of the most popular fairytales from the Grimm Brothers is Cinderella. The portrayal of women in this story is typical of the weak, subjected woman who needs to be rescued by the prince from her unfavourable and subjugated position. The research presented here aims to show that the Grimm’s specific depiction of Cinderella in the 19th century provides an alternative to the modern myth. Here, she reacts strongly and independently to find the most advantageous resolution to her problematic subject position. To this end the Grimms’ version will be compared to text and filmic versions from the 20th and 21st centuries. By comparing aspects of female representation in the Cinderella-themed portrayals, one can evaluate the extent to which societal expectations have altered over time as well as investigating the modern-day implications of this.

Fairy tales are enchanting geographical stories, which affectively organize space-time in socially, politically, and ethically significant ways. Despite this, fairy tales have been neglected in the discipline of geography, and the inter-discipline of fairy tale studies has rarely interrogated the spatialities of tales, or of storytelling more widely. This thesis addresses this lacuna by theorizing the relationship between fairy tales, storytelling, and geography through the subversive folkloric figures of the trickster and crone. It posits, first, that we understand fairy tales as iterative stories that constitute mythic communities; and second, that trickster and crone figures are enchanting territorializing and deterritorializing refrains that subvert this mythic community. These two concerns are explored through Nolan’s (2008) Batman film The Dark Knight, and Maitland’s (2009) short story Moss Witch. An experimental research approach provides insight into these ‘worldly,’ enchanting, and symbolically rich stories, without sacrificing their liveliness or ‘systematizing’ them for ideological gain. The research begins with an interpretive textual analysis to address the symbolic traditions of the fairy tale refrains. Collage enables a ‘retelling’ of the stories as materially and visually expressive media. Genealogical analysis traces the material-discursive matterings of the geographical refrains within academic ‘storytelling.’ These combined approaches ‘story’ the trickster and crone as spatial patterns with affective force. Trickster refrains are animating forces of destruction and chaos. They shift between the centre and periphery of mythic community, violently overturn its seemingly ordered realities, and unfold insecure and profane in-between places, where (human) community can no longer be sustained. The crone refrain enacts a ‘wilding’ in fairy tales, entangling the civilized, storied human polis (or culture more generally) with the nonhuman ‘environment,’ and undermining both relational accounts of being and more romantic discourses of dwelling. Going forward, continued engagement with this nexus of geography, storytelling, and fairy tales promises to enrich our multidisciplinary endeavours, highlight our theoretical ‘matterings’ of fairy tales, and enable more responsible engagement with these endlessly enchanting stories.

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.