This dissertation offers an examination of Delany's critical trajectory from structuralism to poststructuralism and postmodernism across a gamut of genres from SF to sword-and-sorcery, pornography, autobiography and literary criticism. Delany's engagement with semiotics, Foucault and deconstruction form the theoretical focus, together with his own theories of how SF functions as a literary genre, and its standing and reception within the greater realm of literature. The impact of Delany as a gay, black SF writer is also examined against the backdrop of his varied output. I have used the term 'dislocation' to describe Delany's tackling of traditional subjects and genres, and opening them up to further possibilities through critical engagement. Lastly, Delany is also examined as a postmodern icon. A frequent participant in his own texts, as well using pseudonyms that have developed into fully-fledged characters, Delany has become a critical signifier in his own work. / English Studies / M. A. (English)

This project supports the contrary argument that Hemingway provided a voice for the post-Victorian woman, a woman exercising her strength within relationships, her sexuality, her femininity, and her freedom from oppression during the twentieth century women's movement.

This thesis examines how masculinity is attained through various displays of violence, ambivalence, heterosexuality, and sentimentality in the works of Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather.

Picturebooks are an important part of the classroom environment in early childhood education. They open doors to new experiences, nurture students' cultural identities, and invite students to explore connections across cultures. In the United States today, many of the picturebooks that are available to teachers and students in preschool classrooms come from the state curriculum that the school district has implemented. Shifting demographic trends have led many educators to recognize a need for more diversity of literature in classrooms. This study was conducted in response to this growing concern that books should better reflect the cultures and identities of the children who read them, with a particular emphasis on young female children of color. The research question guiding this study is: How do picturebook texts and illustrations in an early childhood curriculum represent the identities of female characters of color as viewed through a critical feminist theoretical lens? To investigate this question, I critically analyzed children's picturebooks from a current early childhood curriculum adopted by the state of Texas, focusing on representations of gender and race. The selected books were analyzed using critical content and critical visual analyses to consider how the text and illustrations together represent female characters of color. Although earlier studies of picturebooks have pointed out a deficit of authentic portrayals of female characters of color, this study found that books in the sample did show some attention to authentic cultural themes including motherhood, action and agency, and subjugated knowledge and culture. However, implications for practice and research included the need for more balanced representation of diverse cultures within the curriculum to better reflect preschool demographics, as well as the need for more classroom instruction on books that give voice and agency to young female children of color as they develop their personal and cultural identities.

In the 1928 romance novel, Dark Princess, W. E. B. Du Bois used the form of a love letter to ask "the first question of our world-work: What are you and I trying to do in this world?" Structured around this vexed notion of "world-work," "'Our World-Work': Gender and Labor in African Diasporic Literatures" takes seriously this communal question of what “you and I”—or we—are "trying to do." I extend Du Bois’s idea to locate the boundaries of the "we" in the face of variations in labor and gender. Thinking world and work together, I consider the grounds of collective narration and social organization on a broad scale, one structured by gender even as anti-sexism is evoked, such as in the case of Du Bois, who is often called a feminist by contemporary scholars. "'Our World-Work'" covers a range of twentieth-century writing, focusing on how figures and figurations of the "black woman," often at the site of the domestic, came to embody some of the urgent issues raised by the globalization of capital. Reading multi-genre works by Du Bois, Alice Childress, Ousmane Sembène, Paule Marshall, and others, "'Our World-Work'" explores how black writers and intellectuals were thinking, writing, and critiquing the world—and worlds—through their encounters with labor and gender during the middle of the last century. Attention to gender in this dissertation illuminates how modes of affiliation also contain exclusions. "'Our World-Work'" contributes to scholarship on accounts of worlding, intervening in critical debates around race, gender, and labor in the fields of black, feminist, postcolonial, and comparative literary studies.

Given the strong emphasis on plurality, which is so characteristic of current masculinity studies, the relationship between masculinity as a concept and its plural forms has to be rethought. If we conceive of masculinity as having a largely discursive and narrative structure and accept that narrative is an ontological condition of social life which exemplarily manifests itself in literature and the arts, it is precisely here that a plethora of narratives of masculinity becomes ‘visible’, with the performative function of narrative allowing for a variety of new masculine gender identities and subject positions that only become available through their conception in literature/the arts.

Thesis (M. A. (English Studies)) -- University of Limpopo / The primary aim of this study is to examine gender stereotypes and their profound impact on the socialisation of females and males. Further, it analyses the extent to which these stereotypes inform the relations and interactions between males and females and their general deportment. Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga and The Joys of Motherhood (1994) by Buchi Emecheta are the selected primary fictional texts to be textually examined and analysed. The study focuses on women oppression, discrimination, misogyny, sexism, marginalisation and subjugation that flow from gender socialisation. Furthermore, gender socialisation cultivates in the male a macho sense of self-importance, privilege, entitlement, invincibility and substantive power. Lastly, the study seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge about the topical debate on women emancipation and gender equity transforming patriarchal societies.

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In this study, I challenge previous assumptions on Thucydides’ silence on gender in the History in order to understand this erasure as a central component of the historian’s attempt at asserting authorial control over a narrative of crisis. My project investigates the gendered strategies employed by Attic tragedy and historiography to represent defiant speakers – characters who challenge traditional speech, like Antigone or the Corcyreans, or those who speak ambiguously, like Cassandra and Alcibiades – in the context of 5th century Athens. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction of the relationship between Thucydidean historiography and drama, my project presents a theoretical reorientation of how the two genres can and should be read in parallel. Methodologically, I integrate close readings with the insights afforded by Anne Carson’s creative engagements with antiquity in order to analyze how gender structures the meaning-making systems in these narratives. Following a chronotropic trajectory, this dissertation investigates how gender refracts through the ways in which the tragedians and Thucydides represent issues of time, space and place, and perception; it then ends by returning to time to offer a critical re-evaluation of the receptions and afterlives of Greek tragedy and history. Ultimately, this study offers a methodology that helps us model a parallel reading of Attic tragedy and Thucydidean historiography; not in order to “test out” the historicity of tragedy against Thucydides’ account, but rather to use tragedy to fill the gap of gender in the History. Probing this dialogue – a dialogue informed as much by silence and omission as by contact and shared vocabulary – among ancient and modern, tragic and historiographic, originary and receptive models of literary entanglement challenges us to rethink the political potential of transgressive speakers within canonical narratives, and to reflect on the role that gender has in shaping these discursive tensions.

by Lui Sha-Lee. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-149). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Acknowledgements --- p.vi / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Ideological Implications of “Madness´ح in Western and Chinese Culture --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Madwoman as the Murderous Daughter: Kitty Fitzgerald's Marge and Tie Ning's The Cliff in the Afternoon --- p.36 / Chapter Chapter Four --- "Madwoman as the Murderous Wife: Elsa Lewin's I, Anna and Li Ang's The Butcher ´ةs Wife" --- p.83 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Conclusion --- p.121 / Notes --- p.134 / Works Cited --- p.143