The relationship between modernist fiction and visual culture has received substantial critical attention in recent years. However, many of the studies on this intermediality focus primarily on the drama, poetry, and novels of male authors, with Virginia Woolf being the only significant exception to this rule. I propose that this engagement with the visual in modernist fiction has a different social and cultural significance in the works of women writers. With reference to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, I will explore the attempt to establish a female literary voice in what was perhaps the greatest transitory period for the role of women in the Western world. Although studies exist that consider the relationship between Mansfield’s writing and modern art and cinema, this thesis will provide a wider context for this period of cultural history. I take a variety of technological advancements into account, examining they ways in which they collectively provided the inspiration behind modernist literature’s new subjectivity of vision. As well as film, I will discuss the arts that developed prior to or alongside it, from the magic lantern to photography, and the impact they had on literature as writers sought new forms of representation. Furthermore, I believe that I will be able to examine this shift in cultural consciousness in a unique way through my focus on Mansfield, an author whose experimental work has received far less critical attention in terms of its engagement with other media than that of her contemporaries. Through reference to the visual arts, Mansfield was able to subjectively focalise her short stories through the eyes of her characters, presenting the ways in which women see and are seen in early twentieth-century society.

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A discussion of possible means by which the varnish of Master John's portrait of Katherine Parr (c.1545) might be conserved, providing historical context and a description of new conservation methods.

This paper analyzes Allt, Martina Lowden's novel from 2006, from a media discursive perspective. The theoretical framework consists of Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, Friedrich Kittler's research on hermeneutic reading, and N. Katherine Hayles's studies of pattern–randomness controlled meaning production. Various examples on how communication technology influences the narrator’s act of writing illustrate the medial discourse surrounding the body of Allt. Initially the underlying archive that constitutes the narrators raw material for writing (lists, lexical representations and institutional bibliographies) will be identified. The archival background is, further on, essential for the understanding of how a hermeneutic act of reading (to compare with the product of the late 1800-century educational reform, described by Kittler in his essay "Authorship and Love") takes place throughout the novel. Confronted through a hermeneutic interaction, the literature surrounding the act of writing in Allt, becomes meaningful when put back into a distribution system; when red about and written again – in short, when mutated to fit on to new text consumers. This constant and instant meaning production is, as a final step in this paper, compared with the pattern-randomness network described in Hayles's book How We Became Posthuman.

Abstract: This thesis aims to explore how utopian desires re/shape the posthuman, cyberspace and histories by means of information technologies in William Gibson¡¦s Idoru and All Tomorrow¡¦s Parties, which construct a fragmented but subversive power by representing the world in a utopian text that allows the free play of ideology. Gibson uses utopian imagination to cobble together a near future that reflects his concern with information technologies and media over contemporary society. Utopian imaginations on the one hand open up possibilities and transform fixed ideas; on the other, utopian imaginations are easily turned into utopian desires that are subject to manipulation if utopian designers want to sell. I intend to discover how desires to realize a utopia (body, space, and history), which is the ultimate goal of utopian program, are being manipulated by utopian designers. I will mainly adapt and blend Katherine Hayles¡¦s notion of the posthuman perspectives to challenge human possibilities, Donna Haraway¡¦s notion of the cyborg as a blasphemy to Western traditions, Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus to examine utopic expressions in William Gibson¡¦s textual constructions of utopias, and Walter Benjamin¡¦s notions of material historiography and history¡¦s messianic power in tracing individual memories under a capitalist contextualized History. In Chapter One, I will argue that Idoru as well as Idoru metamorphosize from a dialectical structure into an informational pattern-random structure, from a commodity into a posthuman subjectivity. I will adopt Katherine Hayles¡¦s concept of information narratives in explaining the re/shaping of Rei¡¦s body and her concept of the posthuman to explicate the struggle between the posthuman and the transhuman. In Chapter Two I will argue that cyberspace serves as a utopia that brings forth the desire to transcend the flesh. This utopian desire is a transgressive discourse that breaks up the totality of a closed system. Moreover, cyberspace exposes the feedback looping of the discourses of capitalism and anti-capitalism. Respectively, by the representation of virtual Venice and the Walled City, these two utopias write proposals that project discourses of pleasure and criticism for achieving their programs. I will adopt Donna Haraway¡¦s cyborg ontology in explaining cyberspace as a transgressive discourse and Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus of utopic expressions and the limits of utopia. Next, in Chapter Three, I shall expose how Harwood the capitalist manipulates the world to fit into his utopian proposal: modernization of the city as a manifestation of a utopia by means of cyberspace as a network that connects people globally. To contravene Harwood, Idoru, Laney and the Walled City denizens collaborate to checkmate Harwood¡¦s king. I will elaborate on the interactions between the universal history and the individual histories based on Walter Benjamin¡¦s concept of history.

One of the most peculiar developments of the wave of women's spirituality that swept across Europe during the thirteenth century was the popularity of the anchoritic lifestyle in England, a lifestyle that had a particular appeal for women. The anchorhold seems to epitomize the medieval (male) desire to enclose and control a woman's body to the maximum degree possible; it is an amazingly accurate metaphor for the tightly circumscribed lives of medieval religious women. Why, then, did so many women eagerly seek out and embrace such a confining lifestyle? Did women internalize the endless medieval rhetoric about bodily control and woman's lustful nature, to the point where they sought lifelong incarceration to avoid temptation and possible loss of control? Or is it possible that they had a higher motivation - that they sought a more intense experience of union with the divine, and believed that only in strict isolation could such a union be achieved?The popularity of anchoritic spirituality led to the creation of a specialized literary genre in Middle English: vernacular devotional prose for women. These mostly male-authored texts included guidebooks for enclosed life, meditations and prayers, lives of saints, and treatises on virginity. They describe and encourage a religious life for women that is both relational and mimetic: the bride of Christ is also encouraged to emulate Christ through her life of solitary penance and suffering. These two roles are analyzed through an examination of the texts of the Katherine Group, alongside the two themes that dominated medieval religious discourse as it applied to women: virginity and enclosure.Approaching the task from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, I employ a variety of theoretical tools, including cultural/historical, theological, linguistic, and feminist theories. My study analyzes medieval constructions of gender and virginity, and examines the anchoress as both a spiritual person and an embodied creature. In challenging traditional scholarship on and accepted views of medieval English women, I pose new questions about embodied spirituality from a medieval perspective, and offer a different perspective on a period of English history in which women recluses set the standard for holiness and sanctity.

This thesis considers Katherine Mansfield’s development as a writer in relation to late nineteenth and early twentieth century developments and trends in the visual arts in New Zealand, England and France. Mansfield’s notebooks, letters and stories evidence a definite response to developments in modern art and reveal that she aligned herself more closely with painters than with her literary colleagues; something Francis Carco hints at in his fictional account of her in Les Innocents (1916): he describes Mansfield as a predatory and exploitative woman with a detached manner, who “used him just the way a painter uses a model, studying character and movements” (cited in Mortelier 150). There exists in Mansfield’s stories evidence of the influence of the Impressionist and, to a lesser degree, the Post-Impressionist painters. While this influence has been noted by a selection of critics or rather her work has been described as impressionistic, it has been neither explored nor substantiated from an art historical perspective. My methodology has entailed identifying the defining characteristics of Mansfield’s stories that are also found in Impressionism, in as much as two different aesthetic forms can be compared. I then trace the exhibition history and contemporaneous criticism of modern French art in London and Paris alongside Mansfield’s trajectory in adulthood to ascertain the degree of exposure she had to Impressionism. In addition to that which she encountered in Europe, much consideration has been given to the artistic milieu of New Zealand prior to and following her schooling in London. I have sought to identify which of the modern artists and styles Mansfield most closely identified with, and to determine how precisely and extensively she applied the Impressionists’ painterly techniques and stylistic effects to her own prose. Broadly speaking, Mansfield’s preferred subjects may be grouped under three titles: Domestic Interiors, Urban Landscapes and Rural Landscapes – these were also the Impressionists’ favoured subjects. These categories, then, form the basis of my investigations.1 This thesis also explores the degree to which Mansfield’s colonial upbringing influenced, inspired and determined the themes and issues she chose to address, from the various forms of expression that were available to her to inherit and modify. My research reveals how both the cultural climate and the unique light and landscape of her own country made her susceptible to the ideas of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, even before she reached the more art-oriented cities of London and Paris. Mansfield’s status as a foreigner in Europe allowed her greater freedom to experiment and greater licence to borrow from other cultural forms and traditions. Though strains of Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism and 1 The consequence of choosing to structure my material around Mansfield’s three dominant subjects has resulted in some degree of repetition within this manuscript. This also means, however, that the individual chapters are strong enough to stand alone and thus this doctoral thesis should prove a valuable reservoir for future research. 6 Expressionism are all evident in Mansfield’s modernist fiction, it is the impressionistic quality of her work – evident in the fleeting and evocative sketches of the everyday – that is the overriding feature. Her colonial heritage was not only a significant factor in this development, but to a degree, the enabling condition – allowing her to reconcile the lessons of Europe within a New Zealand literary context resulting in a unique brand of Colonial Impressionism. NOTE ON THE TEXT Mansfield’s inconsistent and idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation have been retained within quotes in this thesis. In her letters she often dispensed with apostrophes and rarely used commas, instead preferring the dash. When citing, I have chosen not to follow these particular oddities with [sic] as these would be too numerous and would disrupt the flow of the text. I have instead followed the conventions of Mansfield’s editors.

William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, Harry Crews in A Feast of Snakes, and Kathryn Stockett in The Help each depict African Americans in roles as domestic servants. The differing historical situations of the novels play a large part in the disparity among the depictions. However, each novel clearly holds black domestic laborers in contrast to their white employers. These texts’ depictions of black domestic servants and the whites for whom they care are at different points strikingly similar and tellingly disparate. The overlaps and fissures between black domestic servants portrayed as mammy’s and uncles and black domestic servants characterized as powerful and morally upright human beings and what those overlaps and fissures demonstrate about the novels and the historical moments of their creations will be the focus of this study.

Thesis (Ph.D) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 466-497.

Thesis (MA)--Macquarie University (Division of Humanities, Department of English), 2006. / Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in English in the Division of Humanities, Dept. of English, 2006. Bibliography: p. 199-210.