No description available.

This is a collection of short stories.

No description available.

This essay uses feminist theory to examine whether the female narrator in Joanna Russ science fiction novel We who are about to… can be viewed as a personification of women’s struggle against an oppressive male society. The thesis of the essay is that the female narrator’s struggle against the male oppressors in the novel represents the struggle for women’s rights in Western society. The essay will also examine if teaching feminist theory and including women science fiction writers in the classroom will promote gender equality and thus fulfil the requirements of the Swedish curriculum.

This study explores the hierarchy of symbolic value between literary and genre fiction through a discourse analysis of book reviews of chick lit and critically acclaimed books published between 1998-2008 in leading review publications such as The New York Times, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. Genre fiction is typically accorded less symbolic value than literary fiction, and, at times, distaste for genre fiction has lead to distaste for its audience. Evidence for these assertions can be found in the type of language employed in book reviews of chick lit and critically acclaimed novels, especially in the use of adjectives, opinion words, as well as terms used to describe writing techniques, characters, authors, and reading publics.

This study explores the hierarchy of symbolic value between literary and genre fiction through a discourse analysis of book reviews of chick lit and critically acclaimed books published between 1998-2008 in leading review publications such as The New York Times, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. Genre fiction is typically accorded less symbolic value than literary fiction, and, at times, distaste for genre fiction has lead to distaste for its audience. Evidence for these assertions can be found in the type of language employed in book reviews of chick lit and critically acclaimed novels, especially in the use of adjectives, opinion words, as well as terms used to describe writing techniques, characters, authors, and reading publics.

This thesis examines the intersections between biography and fiction in three novels and one biography by Carol Shields: Small Ceremonies, Swann, The Stone Diaries, and Jane Austen. By writing about biography and biographers in each novel, Carol Shields foregrounds the subject of biography and emphasizes its reliance on imagination and creative interpretation. At the same time, she stresses the deficiencies in the factual records of Jane Austen's life in her biography. Although biography is considered to be the more factual of the two genres, Shields establishes that only fiction has the power to portray people's inner lives, and that certain truths are therefore accessible only through fiction. Shields is especially interested in using fiction to recover the life stories of women, which have often been lost from historical record. / English

This novel manuscript explores the connections between art, the city of Calgary, and political complacency. Legislated into the school and job chosen by her high school career test results, a law student attends a party at a heritage house in Calgary and takes a tour through the rooms, hoping to encounter a lost acquaintance. In this world, careers are divided into five ambiguous "Fifths" (labour, service, secondary service, small business, and corporate science) none officially more valuable than any of the others. "Fifth Fifths", though, are the best paid, their post-secondary educations heavily subsized. The characters adhere unquestioningly to the ideology of the government in power (as Albertans historically have done), though they resent their lack of choice and recognize injustice. They, like most of the characters featured in popular Calgary history books, are the ones ultimately benefiting from the system. / English

The thesis Blood Ties is a novel in the epic fantasy tradition. It is intended to be the first of The Castings Trilogy. A synopsis of the second and third books of the trilogy is also included. The exegesis, “‘Kings. What a good idea.’: Monarchy in epic fantasy fiction”, examines some of the reasons writers from democratic countries may choose to use monarchical political structures in epic fantasy novels. It considers evidence from folktale research, primate behavioural studies, literary traditions, both ancient and modern, and the effect of religious doctrine and history on the symbolic role of the monarch. Folktales are found to have had very little effect on the role of kings in epic fantasy, which has been influenced by a combination of literary traditions, including the Arthurian saga and the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. More profoundly, the meaning of the king’s role has been influenced by the Christian mythos in two ways: the king is a Christ surrogate who sacrifices his own safety for the good of the body politic and, in being successful against evil, restores a version of Paradise/Eden for his people.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences / I thought a Euro coin would be a good main character for my story, the perfect medium to go everywhere and traverses social strata, gender and culture. The story and character are a pretext to visit different European countries, following the uncontrolled trip of the coin from one’s pocket to someone else’s wallet. Through the point of view of the coin, we are able to apprehend slices of daily life in Europe, of the actual state of the unity of the countries, at different levels, political, administrative and cultural. Through the coin’s experiences we see the reactions of ordinary people to the new currency: resentment of the way Europe is changing, indifference to whatever may occur, or the feeling that idealistic values are in danger when facing Kafkaesque bureaucratic decisions or the fact that 380 combinations are needed to translate every speech in every language of the Union. I chose a low-value coin rather than a banknote, because of its greater insignificance. A five cents coin comes and goes. The novel is also a reflection on money, its power, the triumph of capitalism in countries formerly communists or socialists and examine if this power is a “necessary evil” or a human weakness that needs to be reformed if possible. The novel is written using literary constraints, so the theoretical component of the thesis presents a short history of constraints as they have been explored, analysed and put in practice by OuLiPo (A Primer of Potential Literature) and authors like Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau or Christian Bök. Some of the constraints I used were unexpected like the use of daily News Agencies news (Reuters, AFP) dealing with Europe and the E.U. that I discovered and incorporated in the story while writing it. I believe that constraints can trigger creativity. The strategies I used while writing have been identified, analysed and categorized, as well as the solutions I found to sometimes overcome these constraints and keeping the novel readable and consistent.