In 1808, a French maid-servant, Marie (or Maria) Paradis, became the first woman to ascend Mont Blanc, thereby establishing her place in women’s mountaineering history. Paradis’ success was followed by that of a wealthy French countess, Henriette D’Angeville, who successfully summited Mont Blanc in 1838. In her French narrative of the ascent, Mon Excursion Au Mont Blanc en 1838 (translated into English in 1992 by Jennifer Barnes as My Ascent of Mont Blanc), D’Angeville urged women mountaineers to write narratives of their mountaineering, arguing that it was important that they write the “feminine stamp” (xxiv) or feminine experience of mountaineering. Histories of women’s mountaineering, for example, Shirley Angell’s history of the women-only Pinnacle Club, Pinnacle Club: A History of Women Climbing, Bill Birkett and Bill Peascod’s 1989 book, Women Climbing: 200 Years of Achievement bring into the public domain a largely hidden history of women’s mountaineering but provide only tantalising glimpses of the feminine mountaineering experience. Drawing on life-writing scholarship, this thesis explores women’s mountaineering from the early nineteenth century to 1960, reading a range of published and non-published life-writings of women mountaineers including autobiographies, letters and diaries to explore the myriad and complex nuances in women’s mountaineering beyond descriptive history. The thesis also draws on wider women’s mountaineering literature in the form of articles published by women mountaineers in the Year Books published by the Ladies’ Alpine Club, the journal of the women-only Pinnacle Club and occasional articles published within other mountaineering publications such as the Alpine Journal. Taking Paradis’ achievement as the historical starting point, my thesis reads women’s mountaineering narratives through a critical lens which explores the feminine experience of mountaineering using discourses of gender and domesticity. I specifically examine how women mountaineers challenged the culturally constructed values informing their role and identity as women and how they variously narrate their experience to write the “feminine stamp” in mountaineering literature. Whilst the term “feminine stamp” might suggest a universality of experience both in women’s mountaineering and in their narratives – and could therefore claim to be representing a form of essentialism – my thesis will follow the work of Alison Stone in suggesting that whilst the women in this thesis have a common gender, their experience of and relationship to mountaineering is individual. As Stone writes, women need to be “reconceived as a specifically non-unified type of social group” (2) in order that their individuality may be represented. However, Stone also points out there are specific historical instances – women’s suffrage for example – which show that “women can still exist as a determinate group, susceptible to collective mobilisation” (25). For that reason, the focus of my thesis ranges from case studies of individual women mountaineers – for example, Paradis, D’Angeville, Gertrude Bell, Dorothy Pilley and others – to an evaluation of the role played by collective initiatives such as les cordées feminines (women-only ropes in mountaineering), mobilised as a result of membership of a community of women mountaineers. My thesis will examine the role of the Ladies’ Alpine Club and Pinnacle Club in enabling and progressing collective developments in women’s mountaineering and fills a gap in existing research studies of women’s mountaineering literature by reading and considering the previously un-researched diaries of Dorothy Pilley alongside collective achievements. These narratives are placed within wider life-writing discourse and specific cultural and historical contexts such as the fin de siècle in order to offer insights into how women transcended their gendered role in order to become mountaineers. The primary focus of this thesis, for reasons of space and focus is on the life-writings of UK and European women mountaineers. This thesis notes the inter-disciplinary and international nature of research into women’s mountaineering in the fields of leisure and sports studies, geography, feminist and women’s studies, sociology, history and literary studies and, where appropriate, draws on this wider literature for comparative purposes.

Life writing is always constituted of alternate versions of the self and the lived life of the self. The duplicities inherent in life writing are central to this study. These duplicities refer not only to the doubleness, but also to the constructedness, of life writing. My enabling assumption is that a life lived is never the same as the life written. Some of the questions at stake in the discourse of life writing include: How may the self be represented in literary form? How is biography a necessary ground of autobiography? What is the borderline between history and life story? Why and how is a lived life different from a written life? How much "truth" is there in life writing? One obvious starting point is to trace the history of selfhood, or the identity of the self. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) provides a thorough analysis of the sources of the self in its historical transformation from Plato's time to our era. However, only recently have media theorists such as Eric Havelock (1963), Benedict Anderson (1991), Mark Poster (1995) and Ronald J. Deibert (1997) offered an estimate of how self-identity changes as technology varies, and how the form of communication alters the bases of identity. Based on discoveries in neuroscience, Paul Eakin (1999) uses narrative theory to explain why life writing is always made up of multiple versions and how the notion of selfhood is profoundly shaped by culture. William Spengemann's historical and philosophical analysis of traditional autobiographies helps to explain different forms of autobiography in terms of personal motives and cultural reasons for writing. This study shows that life writing is necessarily a process of translation in which facts must be transmuted into stories. In the process of translation, there are always alternate versions of the self, forms, media, voices, narratives, realities and finally alternate versions of fictions. By looking at seven of Carol Shields's fictions, this study aims to illustrate how Shields goes beyond models of historical, philosophical, and poetic self-presentation to find new ways and new forms for self-presentation in life writing. / October 2007

Despite Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism, until recently, the perspectives of the country’s lesser-known, marginalized writers have not been usually taken into consideration in mainstream discussions on the nature of Canadian identity and its socio cultural mosaic. Specifically, minority life writing narratives had generally received little critical attention in Canada. This paper aims to fill this slowly-decreasing gap through the exploration of two texts whose female writers negotiate their distinct ethnic and national selves within the cultural dominant of Canada. The essay compares Apolonja Kojder’s Polish-Canadian memoir, Marynia, Don’t Cry, to Rita Joe’s Mi’kmaq-Canadian autobiography, Song of Rita Joe. The analysis of these texts sets the Polish and Aboriginal communities into conversation, and yields a discussion on the nature of cultural, national, linguistic and female identity. It argues that identity is political, relational and always in process. Since much of the personal narrative writers’ identity struggle in an alien land and language often unravels as a translation of the self into another world, the two personal narratives add nuance to our understanding of the contradictions found in institutional policies. The study creates awareness of the literary and discursive strategies by which writers of disadvantaged communities challenge and subvert cultural oppression, identity misconstructions, and the exclusion of ethnic and women’s histories from within mainstream society. However, through the textual hybridization of cultures, languages, histories and life experiences, Kojder’s and Joe’s intention is to facilitate understanding across groups, create respect for diversity, propel social participation and induce socio political transformation. This paper means to shed light on the Canadian experience in its unique variations, and to add to life writing studies on ethnic and national individuals’ personal encounters with and within the Canadian socio- cultural and political milieu.

Despite Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism, until recently, the perspectives of the country’s lesser-known, marginalized writers have not been usually taken into consideration in mainstream discussions on the nature of Canadian identity and its socio cultural mosaic. Specifically, minority life writing narratives had generally received little critical attention in Canada. This paper aims to fill this slowly-decreasing gap through the exploration of two texts whose female writers negotiate their distinct ethnic and national selves within the cultural dominant of Canada. The essay compares Apolonja Kojder’s Polish-Canadian memoir, Marynia, Don’t Cry, to Rita Joe’s Mi’kmaq-Canadian autobiography, Song of Rita Joe. The analysis of these texts sets the Polish and Aboriginal communities into conversation, and yields a discussion on the nature of cultural, national, linguistic and female identity. It argues that identity is political, relational and always in process. Since much of the personal narrative writers’ identity struggle in an alien land and language often unravels as a translation of the self into another world, the two personal narratives add nuance to our understanding of the contradictions found in institutional policies. The study creates awareness of the literary and discursive strategies by which writers of disadvantaged communities challenge and subvert cultural oppression, identity misconstructions, and the exclusion of ethnic and women’s histories from within mainstream society. However, through the textual hybridization of cultures, languages, histories and life experiences, Kojder’s and Joe’s intention is to facilitate understanding across groups, create respect for diversity, propel social participation and induce socio political transformation. This paper means to shed light on the Canadian experience in its unique variations, and to add to life writing studies on ethnic and national individuals’ personal encounters with and within the Canadian socio- cultural and political milieu.

Life writing is always constituted of alternate versions of the self and the lived life of the self. The duplicities inherent in life writing are central to this study. These duplicities refer not only to the doubleness, but also to the constructedness, of life writing. My enabling assumption is that a life lived is never the same as the life written. Some of the questions at stake in the discourse of life writing include: How may the self be represented in literary form? How is biography a necessary ground of autobiography? What is the borderline between history and life story? Why and how is a lived life different from a written life? How much "truth" is there in life writing? One obvious starting point is to trace the history of selfhood, or the identity of the self. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) provides a thorough analysis of the sources of the self in its historical transformation from Plato's time to our era. However, only recently have media theorists such as Eric Havelock (1963), Benedict Anderson (1991), Mark Poster (1995) and Ronald J. Deibert (1997) offered an estimate of how self-identity changes as technology varies, and how the form of communication alters the bases of identity. Based on discoveries in neuroscience, Paul Eakin (1999) uses narrative theory to explain why life writing is always made up of multiple versions and how the notion of selfhood is profoundly shaped by culture. William Spengemann's historical and philosophical analysis of traditional autobiographies helps to explain different forms of autobiography in terms of personal motives and cultural reasons for writing. This study shows that life writing is necessarily a process of translation in which facts must be transmuted into stories. In the process of translation, there are always alternate versions of the self, forms, media, voices, narratives, realities and finally alternate versions of fictions. By looking at seven of Carol Shields's fictions, this study aims to illustrate how Shields goes beyond models of historical, philosophical, and poetic self-presentation to find new ways and new forms for self-presentation in life writing.

Life writing is always constituted of alternate versions of the self and the lived life of the self. The duplicities inherent in life writing are central to this study. These duplicities refer not only to the doubleness, but also to the constructedness, of life writing. My enabling assumption is that a life lived is never the same as the life written. Some of the questions at stake in the discourse of life writing include: How may the self be represented in literary form? How is biography a necessary ground of autobiography? What is the borderline between history and life story? Why and how is a lived life different from a written life? How much "truth" is there in life writing? One obvious starting point is to trace the history of selfhood, or the identity of the self. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) provides a thorough analysis of the sources of the self in its historical transformation from Plato's time to our era. However, only recently have media theorists such as Eric Havelock (1963), Benedict Anderson (1991), Mark Poster (1995) and Ronald J. Deibert (1997) offered an estimate of how self-identity changes as technology varies, and how the form of communication alters the bases of identity. Based on discoveries in neuroscience, Paul Eakin (1999) uses narrative theory to explain why life writing is always made up of multiple versions and how the notion of selfhood is profoundly shaped by culture. William Spengemann's historical and philosophical analysis of traditional autobiographies helps to explain different forms of autobiography in terms of personal motives and cultural reasons for writing. This study shows that life writing is necessarily a process of translation in which facts must be transmuted into stories. In the process of translation, there are always alternate versions of the self, forms, media, voices, narratives, realities and finally alternate versions of fictions. By looking at seven of Carol Shields's fictions, this study aims to illustrate how Shields goes beyond models of historical, philosophical, and poetic self-presentation to find new ways and new forms for self-presentation in life writing.

Modern biographies of William Shakespeare abound: new studies appear almost every year, each claiming new research and new insights, while affirming that there are enough records for a documentary life. In this thesis, I argue that no biography of Shakespeare is possible due to insufficient material, that most of what is written about Shakespeare cannot be verified from primary sources, and that Shakespearean biography did not attain scholarly or academic respectability until Samuel Schoenbaum’s Documentary Life (1975). The thesis therefore is concerned with demythologising Shakespeare by exposing numerous “biogra-fictions.” I begin by reviewing the history and practice of biography as a narrative account of a person’s life based on primary sources. Next I assess the very limited biographical material for Shakespeare identifying the gaps, e.g. there is no record that he spent any of his childhood in Stratford or ever attended school. A historical review of writing about Shakespeare demonstrates that there were no serious attempts to reconstruct his life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merely some comments and unverifiable anecdotes. I demonstrate that the greatest Shakespearean scholar, Edmond Malone, realised that no narrative account of Shakespeare’s life was possible. I show how the earliest biographies of Shakespeare emerged in the 1840s in line with the Victorian need to identify national heroes. Schoenbaum’s deeply flawed study has greatly influenced academics who have followed his structure and myths in their own biographies. My analysis of the contrasting descriptions of Shakespeare’s relationships with Southampton and with Jonson demonstrate that the very limited biographical material can only be expanded through speculation and inference. Finally, I propose that study of Shakespeare’s life should be confined to discrete topics, starting from a sceptical examination of primary sources. Any attempt at an account of his life or personality amounts, however, merely to “biografiction”.

Despite Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism, until recently, the perspectives of the country’s lesser-known, marginalized writers have not been usually taken into consideration in mainstream discussions on the nature of Canadian identity and its socio cultural mosaic. Specifically, minority life writing narratives had generally received little critical attention in Canada. This paper aims to fill this slowly-decreasing gap through the exploration of two texts whose female writers negotiate their distinct ethnic and national selves within the cultural dominant of Canada. The essay compares Apolonja Kojder’s Polish-Canadian memoir, Marynia, Don’t Cry, to Rita Joe’s Mi’kmaq-Canadian autobiography, Song of Rita Joe. The analysis of these texts sets the Polish and Aboriginal communities into conversation, and yields a discussion on the nature of cultural, national, linguistic and female identity. It argues that identity is political, relational and always in process. Since much of the personal narrative writers’ identity struggle in an alien land and language often unravels as a translation of the self into another world, the two personal narratives add nuance to our understanding of the contradictions found in institutional policies. The study creates awareness of the literary and discursive strategies by which writers of disadvantaged communities challenge and subvert cultural oppression, identity misconstructions, and the exclusion of ethnic and women’s histories from within mainstream society. However, through the textual hybridization of cultures, languages, histories and life experiences, Kojder’s and Joe’s intention is to facilitate understanding across groups, create respect for diversity, propel social participation and induce socio political transformation. This paper means to shed light on the Canadian experience in its unique variations, and to add to life writing studies on ethnic and national individuals’ personal encounters with and within the Canadian socio- cultural and political milieu. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Rural China has gone through dramatic transformation from the Mao era to the post-Mao era. China scholars have been studying the institutional changes closely in the past few decades. However, Chinese peasants’ living experience and their memory and understanding of the past have not yet received enough attention and discussion. By examining personal writings of a peasant named Luo Xuechang in Jiande, Zhejiang province, this paper discusses the complex interactions between the state and the individual. This paper attempts to unfold the juxtaposition of state narratives and personal narratives embedded in Luo’s unpublished memoir, almanacs from 1972 to 1980, notebooks and other personal writings. By focusing on Luo’s writings on his family life, education, work and political perspectives, this paper reveals how Luo altered his personal narratives over time and how Luo carefully conformed with and digressed from state-produced national narratives to make sense of his own history.

This thesis presents a detailed study of the seventeenth century diplomat Sir Anthony Sherley's Relation of his Travels into Persia (1613). Sherley and his younger brother Robert travelled to Persia with a sizeable company of experienced English military officers who had originally been detailed to bolster the defences of Ferrara against an expected invasion by the Papal States in late 1597. Sherley remained in Persia for six months, which coincided with the Shah's return from a military expedition that had effectively secured his eastern frontiers against invasion, and as he embarked on preparations for a war of reconquest against the Ottomans, which was seized on by Sherley and his brothers to produce a stream of books, assuming credit for the later outbreak of war between the Muslim powers. Anthony and Robert Sherley were celebrated for inciting the Persians to war against the Turks, and their reputation was cemented with the publication of John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins' play entitled Travails of the Three English Brothers (1607). Day, Rowley and Wilkins' Travails, as well as the brothers' persistent self-promotion through the medium of popular print, has led to the erroneous notion that they were responsible for the establishment of Anglo-Persian diplomatic relations. This thesis provides an account of Sir Anthony Sherley's experiences prior to his journey to Persia, traces his shifting objectives as reflected in the clusters of texts published by and about the Sherley brothers, argues that his account was partly presented as an allegorical romance, and highlights the Machiavellian and Tacitean influences behind the Relation.