<p> Literary study has long been concerned with the construction of meaning and identity through language. In the realm of postcolonialism, for instance, it is necessary to consider the ways that racism and sexism are hegemonic constructs that are transmitted and solidified through language. Furthermore, literary texts such as <i>Heart of Darkness</i> by Joseph Conrad and <i>Season of Migration to the North</i> by Tayeb Salih engage themselves with revealing the ways that racism, sexism, and colonial discourse function through determinacy or certainty. Moreover, Conrad and Salih are engaged in undermining these enterprises of authoritative discourse by revealing the underlying indeterminacy of language and meaning-making. In other words, they show that meaning exists as humanity constructs it. Thus, it is necessary to consider the ways that they question racism, sexism, and colonialism as movements of thought, discourse, and action that have no rational foundations; and it is necessary to consider the ways that they seek to frame the resistance of these forces in their characters.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation advances Gothic studies by 1) arguing that Gothic is an imperial discourse and tracing back its origins to imperial activity, 2) by establishing a Hinterland Gothics discourse framework within the Gothic Imagination, 3) and by defining three particular discourses of Hinterland Gothics: the Gotach (Irish), G&oacute;tico (Mexican-American Mestizx), and the Ethnogothix (African Diaspora), and subsequently, revealing how these Hinterland Gothics undermine, expose, and thwart imperial poltergeists. The primary texts that I analyze and reference were published in the past thirty years and are either of the Young Adult or New Adult persuasion, highlighting imperative moments of identity construction in bildungsroman plots and focusing on the more neglected yet more dynamic hyper-contemporary era of Gothic scholarship, namely: Siobhan Dowd&rsquo;s <i>Bog Child </i> (2008), Celine Kiernan&rsquo;s <i>Into the Grey</i> (2011), Marina Carr&rsquo;s <i>Woman and Scarecrow</i> (2006), Emma P&eacute;rez&rsquo;s <i> Forgetting the Alamo</i> (2009), Virginia Grise&rsquo;s <i>blu</i> (2011), Emil Ferris&rsquo;s graphic novel <i>My Favorite Thing is Monsters </i> (2017), Gloria Naylor&rsquo;s <i>Mama Day</i> (1988), Helen Oyeyemi&rsquo;s <i>White is for Witching</i> (2009), Nnedi Okorafor&rsquo;s <i>Binti</i> (2015) and <i>Binti: Home</i> (2017), and Nicki Minaj&rsquo;s 54^th Annual Grammy Awards performance of &ldquo;Roman Holiday&rdquo; (2012). The cold spots in the white Eurocentric canon where Other presences have been ghosted will be filled, specters will be given flesh, and the repressed will return, indict, and haunt, demanding recognition and justice.</p><p>

<p> In recent years, having evolved beyond solely play-based interactions, it is now possible to analyze video games alongside other narrative forms, such as novels and films. Video games now involve rich stories that require input and interaction on behalf of the player. This level of agency likens video games to a kind of modern hypertext, networking and weaving various narrative threads together, something which traditional modes of media lack. When examined from the lens of reader-response criticism, this interaction deepens even further, acknowledging the player&rsquo;s experience as a valid interpretation of a video game&rsquo;s plot. The wide freedom of choice available to players, in terms of both play and story, in 2007&rsquo;s <i>Mass Effect,</i> along with its critical reception, represents a turning point in the study of video games as literature, exemplifying the necessity for player input in undergoing a narrative-filled journey. Active participation and non-linear storytelling, typified through gaming, are major steps in the next the evolution of narrative techniques, which requires the broadening of literary criticism to incorporate this new development.</p><p>

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Place is not simply the physical reality of the topographical and human geographical features located at a particular position in space. It is also the experience of the associations, images, and memories incorporated in the landscape, with a large input from the observer. Our personal and cultural histories are important in this experience of place, which is therefore both subjective and intersubjective. The sense of place in literature is often particularly expressive of this power of association and imagery — perhaps, because of its concentrated form, especially in poetry. Literature, however, in choosing its imagery, is not only reflective of the historical, cultural and personal associations of place, but is also creative in shaping these associations of place. Literature, because it is selective and imaginative, has the power to alter our experience of place. Many of the works of the Irish literary revival possess an unusually strong sense of place — it was a literary movement which sought to emphasise Ireland and Irish themes. The selectivity and imagination of the writers, particularly because of the romantic and mythological heritages stressed in the revival, resulted in a representation of the Irish landscape -- indeed a vision of Ireland -- which is rich in symbol, association, and image. This Ireland of the imagination was also attractive and powerful enough to become part of Irish nationalist ideology. A romantic vision of the Irish landscape and its people developed by W.B. Yeats, A.E., J.M. Synge and others became part of the nationalism of militant revolutionaries such as Patrick Pearse, leader of the Irish insurrection of Easter 1916 — important in Irish history because it shifted the dominant expression of nationalism from constitutionalism to militancy. It was through the use of force rather than through constitutional methods that a separate Irish nation was established in 1922. This thesis, therefore, has three main themes. Firstly, place is an experience of the imagination -- of association, of memory, and of image. Secondly, literature is important in shaping that imagination because of its symbolism and its power in creating imagery. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ideas of a movement of the imagination such as the Irish literary revival can have a large effect on the ideas, and therefore the ultimate actions, of a movement of action such as, that of the Irish militant nationalists. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

In the period 1890-1914, such playwrights as G. B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Henry Arthur Jones, and Elizabeth Robins led a movement to revive the drama as an intellectual art: these playwrights sought to create a theater that could treat social and political issues and themes hitherto banned from (or limited in treatment on) the public stage while at the same time retaining the theater's hold over a popular audience. In the case of Jones, Wilde, and Shaw, each playwright would revise his early style to create plays that had strong ties to more traditional popular dramas but which nonetheless offered a critique of those older, expected forms. Despite the severe limitations in the theater, dramatists had room for experimentation in the relation of genre to the mise en scene. The nineteenth-century theater had been notable for its preference for "fantasy" genres, such as melodrama and farcical comedy; at the same time, however, the audience maintained an appetite for realism in the staging of plays. It is in this seeming opposition of dramatic form and theatrical realization, the mechanistic and fantastic versus the hyper-real, that the innovators of this period could find a way to change the older drama while working within it. Victorian stage "realism" was in fact carefully contained within generic structures that artificially "solved" social problems depicted in the plays. Wilde, Jones, and Shaw would all manipulate conventions of genre and scenic effect in order to make overt the problem of defining the "real" in the theater. On another front, their critical and theoretical writings analyzed this troublesome connection between the worlds on-and off-stage, and were intended to change the way audiences viewed plays by providing a critical "frame." The Edwardian playwrights also faced the problem of enforced generic continuity, and some of them, particularly St. John Hankin, Harley Granville Barker, and John Galsworthy, would use the continuing popularity of realism to undermine melodramatic structure. Often the settings of their plays, in their mannered distortion of traditional representative scenes, alter the desires of the audience for generic conformity.

Put simply, magical thinking is the belief that one may affect reality by thought alone. Where Freud classifies such a concept as neurotic delusion, Winnicott embraces the idea as a memory from infancy and argues that "omnipotence of thoughts" is the origin of creativity. Both viewpoints are represented in Shakespeare's universe, their positions sometimes at war in the playing out of the hero's dilemma. This dissertation traces the idea of magical thinking through psychoanalysis, anthropology, and art, then explores the battle of thoughts in Shakespeare's tragedies. Freud's viewpoint is well-founded in Hamlet: for thoughts in Denmark are not tools with which to control reality, but a reality that cannot be controlled. The hero drowns in thoughts. He cannot escape them, particularly the thought of Gertrude's infidelity, which resurfaces in dagger words and pregnant metaphors, to the point that sometimes Hamlet forgets his revenge. His search to find a plan to kill the king thus parallels his search to find a way to kill his thoughts. Hamlet tries to bury them in the actor, who can control his thoughts long enough to "act." Both Othello and Macbeth likewise flounder in thoughts they can't control. Othello's thought echoes Hamlet's thought of a woman's infidelity. Othello cannot live with this thought, forget or disprove it. Indeed the thought is like virginity itself: once thought, he can never reclaim his ignorance or his wife's innocence. So he buries the thought in Desdemona's body--then kills it. The thoughts that plague Macbeth, however, are the result, not the cause, of his killing. He murders Duncan and Banquo only to be buried alive with "those thoughts that should indeed have died/With them they think on." Hamlet tries to escape thoughts. Othello's thoughts betray him. Macbeth defies them. Cleopatra embraces them--wholeheartedly, She is the mistress of magical thinking, Winnicott's "good-enough mother," nursing Antony on desire. Though the lovers' dream to be legends, god and goddess, may be delusional, their wish is transformed into a beautiful illusion for the audience as they birth death as Elysium, tragedy as romance, through the magic of poetry.

Today Andrew Marvell's poetry is thought to offer a window onto mid-seventeenth-century English literature and culture, yet scholars find the poet's richly allusive early works puzzling: we often do not know what prompted these compositions, or how to interpret them. Marvell probably wrote much of his early verse in 1651-1652 while working as a tutor at the Fairfax family's Yorkshire estate, Nun Appleton. Four approaches to Marvell's major early work, the estate poem Upon Appleton House, help to clarify the poet's methodology, the Yorkshire cultural and landscape milieus of his 1651-1652 poems, the prominent family for which he worked, and the pedagogic content of the poem itself. In the first approach, textual analysis and pattern-tracing reveal that Marvell developed Upon Appleton House from short poetic studies in Latin and English, and reveal too some ways in which Marvell represented his employer, Thomas Fairfax; his student, Mary Fairfax; and himself, as tutor-poet persona. Next, research on central Yorkshire's historical geography and lore and especially on Fairfax family lands helps explicate Upon Appleton House and shows that Marvell himself was a researcher and close observer of the outdoors. Third, information about the career and retirement of Thomas Fairfax--who in 1650 was nominally Interregnum England's highest-ranking leader--partially demystifies both Fairfax's retirement motives and Marvell's poem. A final approach analyzes Upon Appleton House as a poem for the instruction of thirteen-year-old Mary Fairfax. Marvell apparently drew on ideas from advice-to-a-prince poems, education manuals, puritan theology, and other sources to prepare Mary Fairfax for her future roles as Protestant heiress, dynastic perpetuator, and "natural ruler." Moreover, Marvell lyrically transformed the lands she would inherit into a medium for learning. Each approach to Upon Appleton House includes attention to literary and visual arts' traditions and to Marvell's evolution as a poet. Together, the four approaches go far toward explaining Marvell's 1651-1652 compositional chronology and self-presentation, his descriptions of nature and Yorkshire landscapes, his praise and instruction of Fairfax family members, and his evocations of post-civil-war England.