The purpose of this thesis is to survey Jane Austen biography and criticism published since 1940 in order to show the present state of Jane Austen study while providing a bibliographical guide to recent material.

A critical study of naturalism and its influence in the works of Stephen Crane.

Mark Twain was not only a wit but a literary man. He could paint a scene and he could make a character live, but could he plot a novel? It is the purpose of this study to analyze his methods and his products, with emphasis upon the building of plots.

This paper focuses on Mark Twain's writing style and characterization in his fiction. The settings and characters of his fiction are in particular focus, specifically how Mark Twain draws on personal experiences and memories to make his characters and settings more relatable and realistic. A brief biography of Twain's life is given before the author goes into the specifics of characterization and settings.

This work is on the history of copyright law in two jurisdictions: the United Kingdom and the Republic of Cameroon. It traces the origin and development of copyright protection in these jurisdictions, laying emphasis on the influence of international copyright on the development of copyright law in these two countries. It also focuses on the extent to which copyright laws in both countries have been amended over the years to enable it to catch up with advances in science and technology. As far as the development of copyright law in the United Kingdom is concerned, the major areas discussed include the system of royal copyright privileges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and its role in the birth of the concept of literary property; the role of the Stationers' Company in the early development copyright; the historic Copyright Act of 1709 and its application in England and Scotland; the landmark case of Donaldson v. Beckett and its importance in the formulation of the concept of authors' rights and the demolition of common law copyright; the proliferation of copyright legislation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the consolidation of statutory copyright by the 1911 Copyright Act and, subsequently, the Copyright Act, 1956 and the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts, 1988. Also discussed is the UK's adhesion to certain conventions in the area of copyright and neighbouring rights and the extent to which these conventions have influenced the development of its copyright law.

This thesis seeks to address the literary, cultural and historical questions surrounding what I will suggest was the reconceptualization of fame in the second half of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth centuries. The only previous analyses of celebrity in this period by Leo Braudy and by Frank Donoghue have claimed categorically that even though a democratization of fame occurred in this period only men had sufficient access to the fame machine and thus to the experience of the frenzy of renown. While I argue that this period witnessed the birth of modern concepts of celebrity, I will suggest that a modernization necessarily entailed a feminization of fame. Traditionally, heroic self-sacrifice had led to assured immortality, but with the rapidly expanding print culture of this period, celebrity was often instantaneous, achieved during a lifetime rather than a lifetime achievement. With the dissemination of the media, the rise of newspaper and periodicals and thus, more importantly, the increasing visibility of the celebrity as a person to be admired and emulated came the means to seduce an eager audience by manipulating one’s career or personal image. Opening with an examination of the confessional politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who sought and found a desiring audience for this outpouring of private sensibility and thus initiated a discourse of fame which no longer relied upon the classical stoicism apparent since Ancient Rome, I will investigate how women writers not only ‘puffed’ themselves in the press, but actively engaged in constructing distinct authorial personae in and through their writings. Far from cowering anonymously in the shades, women writers were actively seeking and achieving the limelight, attaining a level of cultural centrality previously thought by critics such as Braudy and Donoghue to be unattainable. Embracing the public and publicity itself, they took advantage of the shifting mechanics of celebrity to place their writings and, ultimately, themselves, on the rostrum, more than eager to gain literary laurels.

Literary texts offer rich opportunities for language learning. However, can second language (L2) learners fully understand L2 literary texts? According to Bernhardt (2001):"the act of reading in a second language is extremely tricky -- is even trickier with literary texts that are inherently ambiguous, full of metaphor and intertextual relations to texts to which the readers have no access" (p.198). In other words, L2 readers are often poorly equipped grammatically, linguistically and culturally to cope with literary texts in which it might be difficult to recognize figurative language, to comprehend metaphors, to identify underlying cultural assumptions and above all to think critically while navigating those complexities. Therefore, during the reading process, L2 readers encounter gaps in the text which necessarily compel them to use whatever background knowledge they possess in order to create meaning. The purpose of this research is to see exactly how post-secondary L2 readers use their existing background knowledge to understand literary texts and what they do when confronted with text passages for which they lack such knowledge.

A collection of stories submitted by Heather Fowler for receipt of an MFA degree in Summer 2015.

This collection consists of a critical preface and nine short stories. Extrapolating from the work and legacy of Michel Foucault, the preface theorizes a genre of “heterotopian fiction” as constitutive of a fundamentally ethical approach to narrative creativity, distinguishing its functional and methodological characteristics from works that privilege aesthetic, thematic, or technical artistry. The stories explore spaces of madness, alterity, incomprehensibility, and liminal experience. Collection includes the stories “Mexico,” “Civilizations without Boats,” The Widow’s Mother,” “Guys Like Us,” “Everything You’d Hoped It Would Be,” “A Concerned Friend,” “Crisis Hotline,” “Coast to Coast,” and “The Ghosts of Rich Men.”

Orientador: Renata Maria Facuri Coelho Marchezan / Banca: Maria Célia Mendonça / Banca: Maria Inês Batista Campos / Resumo: Hodiernamente, observa-se, no âmbito educacional, um grande destaque aos vestibulares como meio de ingresso em boas universidades do país. Como consequência disso, ganha força, dentro de colégios, a prática da produção textual, em especial da redação argumentativa. Tendo isso em vista, esta pesquisa objetiva identificar como ocorrem as relações dialógicas entre o conjunto de enunciados - comumente denominado coletânea - componentes da proposta de redação argumentativa e a redação argumentativa elaborada pelo candidato no vestibular aplicado pela Fundação Universitária para o Vestibular (FUVEST) nos anos 2012 e 2013. Para concretizar o objetivo apontado, primeiramente, são discutidos como e por que a proposta de redação argumentativa e a redação argumentativa escolar podem ser consideradas gêneros do discurso. Seguidamente, são analisadas 14 redações oriundas da prova de vestibular supracitada que mais cumpriram os quesitos avaliados pela banca examinadora. Esta pesquisa caminha pela Análise Dialógica do Discurso, tendo, como eixo basilar de fundamentação, as ideias propostas pelo Círculo de Bakhtin, em especial os conceitos relações dialógicas, diálogo, enunciados, gêneros do discurso, esferas de atividade humana, além de um estudo acerca dos processos de citação e seus tipos. São utilizadas, como corpus, duas propostas de redação argumentativa do vestibular FUVEST (2012 e 2013) e 14 redações argumentativas escolares que, segundo a banca examinadora, atingiram as expectativas... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Nowadays it's common to observe, especially in the scholar context, a huge emphasis in the vestibular exams, since they are a manner to access great universities around the country. Consequently, the practice of textual production, mainly the argumentative genre, gains prominence within schools. Considering this, our research aims to identify how occur the dialogic relations between the group of utterances (which composes the reading material, named by us as argumentative essay proposition) and the argumentative essays created by the candidates who applied to an undergraduating school by using the vestibular exam organized by the University Foundation for Vestibular (FUVEST), during 2012 and 2013. Firstly, in order to accomplish our objectives, it will be discussed how and why the argumentative essay proposition and the middle school argumentative essay may be considered genres of discourse. Furthermore, it will be analyzed 14 essays collected form the FUVEST vestibular exam. These 14 essays were considered by the examiners as having accomplish totally or almost totally the evaluation criteria. It's important to highlight this research has as basis the Dialogic Discourse Analysis theories, especially the theories proposed by the Bakhtin's Circle, notably the concepts: dialogic relations, dialogue, utterance, genres of discourse, spheres of human activities, as well as a study of the quotations' process. Moreover, our corpus is composed by two FUVEST exam's argumentative essay... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre