This thesis discusses twentieth century children's fantasy fiction. The writers whose creative output is dealt with include Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Pat O'Shea, Peter Dickinson, T.H.White, Lloyd Alexander and, to a lesser extent, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien. These authors have been chosen because their books, whilst being of a broadly similar nature, nevertheless have a sufficient diversity to illustrate well many different important aspects of children's fantasy. Chapter I examines the sources of modern fantasy, presents the attitudes of different authors towards borrowing from traditional sources and their reasons for doing so, and looks at the changing interpretation of myths. Chapter II talks about the presentation of the primary and secondary worlds and the ways in which they interact. It also discusses the characters' attitudes towards magic. Chapter III looks at the presentation of magic, examines the traditional fairy-tale conventions and their implementation in modern fantasies, and discusses the concepts of evil, time, and the laws governing fantasy worlds. Chapter IV deals with the methods of narration and the figure of the narrator. It presents briefly the prevailing plot patterns, discusses the use of different kinds of language, and the ideas of pan-determinism and prophecy. The concluding chapter considers the main subjects and aims of children's fantasy, the reasons why the genre is so popular, and its successes and failures.

<p> This dissertation explores the close literary, thematic and linguistic relationships between <i>The Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade</i> and the later pietistic text <i>Sefer Hasidim</i>. Despite a long-standing tendency to view the Jewish martyrdom of 1096 and the development of German pietism (<i>Hasidut Ashkenaz</i>) as unrelated. upon closer scrutiny, we find strong ties between the two texts. <i>Sefer Hasidim</i>, the most well-known pietistic text, contains dozens of martyrological stories and references that share similar language, themes and contexts as the crusade chronicles. Indeed, rather than standing alone, and unrelated to the first crusade literature, we find tales of martyrdom that closely resemble those in the first crusade narratives. <i>Sefer Hasidim</i> also contains numerous statements that indicate the primacy of martyrdom within the hierarchy of the pietistic belief system, while other martyrological references function as prooftext for the traditional pietistic themes distilled by Ivan Marcus and Haym Soloveitchik. The extent to which martyrological themes are integrated into the belief system articulated in <i>Sefer Hasidim</i> indicates that the martyrdom of the First Crusade should be viewed as formative to the development of <i>Hasidut Ashkenaz</i>. A close reading of <i> Sefer Hasidim</i> conclusively demonstrates this premise. Moreover, a similar analysis of the crusade chronicles reveals a wide range of martyrological tales described in quintessential pietistic terms; expressions of the will of God, the fear of God. and the pietistic preference for life in the hereafter, are found throughout the martyrological text.</p><p> When reading these two diverse texts side by side, we find substantive elements of a common world view spanning the period of the first crusade through the appearance of <i>Sefer Hasidim</i>. This allows us to understand each text through a new lens; the crusade chronicles now appear to be an early articulation of pietistic thought, while the later pietistic text now reads in part as a martyrological document of great significance.</p><p>

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<p> The Dark Valley Period and its resultant Asia Pacific War remains an open question in Japan; this era is consistently revisited in both public debates over textbooks and state apology as well as in popular culture and literature. The discussion of the Dark Valley Period and the conflicts it generated also exists within manga, a widely consumed media, and has shifted genres multiple times in the decades following the Japanese surrender. Some genres, such as early senki-mono, portrayed the war as a heroic, although ultimately futile, action undertaken by self-sacrificing youth. Semiautobiographical works, such as those created by the late manga artist Mizuki Shigeru, countered this narrative by showing the war as brutal, senseless, and useless. Often, the popularity or decline of a genre skewed closely to the general attitude concerning the wartime period. </p><p> Due to its wide-scale consumption by youth, manga has the potential to both represent and forward shifts in public perception. Additionally, historical revisionists and anti-Article 9 proponents have shifted their discourse into manga in order to appeal to and influence a younger audience. This strategy is further strengthened by previous genre works, such as the Space Battleship Yamato series, which reframed the Dark Valley Period and the Asia Pacific War in a positive light indirectly through their narrative. This dissertation posits that the discussion has recently shifted into sh?nen/seinen fantasy manga and that this discussion reflects a level of sympathy with revisionist historians that would normally cause a public backlash against the series in question if this sympathy was not masked by genre.</p><p>

This thesis examines the use and function of the human body as a surface that is inscribed with a number of socially significant meanings and how these inscriptions operate in the specific late medieval cultural production. Drawing on Jauss's notion of the social and political significance of medieval narrative, I seek to determine how specific texts contribute to a regulatory practice by thematizing bodies that are perceived as "other," that resist or defy an imagined social norm or stereotype. Each of the dissertation's four chapters treats a different set of notions about the human body. The first one examines Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and The King of Tars as representations of ethnographic difference. I argue that the late Middle Ages did not have the notion of "race" as a signifier of ethnic difference: instead there is a highly unstable system of positions that place an individual in relation to Christian Salvation History. Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is at the centre of chapter two that examines the moral issues surrounding leprosy as a stigmatized disease. Reading the text as a piece of medical historiography, I argue that one of the purposes of the narrative is to establish the link between Cresseid's sexual behaviour and her disease. A discussion of the homosocial underpinnings of late medieval feudal society, particularly in light of Duby's notion of "les jeunes," forms the basis of the final two chapters. Chapter three discusses Chaucer's Legend ofLucrece and the narrative function of rape as a pedagogical instrument with the aim to ensure the availability of untouched female bodies for a "traffic in women" between noblemen. Chapter four examines transgressive sexual acts as the objects of jokes in fabliaux, such as Chaucer's Miller's Tale. By using shame and ridicule as their main strategy, these texts, I argue, fulfil an exemplary function and act as a warning to young noblemen to maintain an erotic discipline as future heads of feudal houses and as an upcoming political elite. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Historian Warren Susman has proposed that the response to an experience is perhaps more important than the experience itself, and the American public responded to the Great Depression of the 1930s by documenting it in different forms and genres, and with different purposes and goals in mind. Given the complex nature of the crisis, the structure and function of the family served as central points of focus toward which many Americans directed their fears, concerns, anxieties, and hopes during the decade; consequently, the family was a frequent focus of the era's documentary texts. This dissertation examines documentary texts from the Depression-era which represent the American family, in an attempt to understand how documentary made sense of the Great Depression and its effects on families, and to determine what family "realities" documentary constructed and sanctioned as valid or depicted as undesirable. Its goal is not to determine how accurately or inaccurately documentary represented some objective "truth" or "reality" of family life, but to explore the complex interrelations between cultural ideals or myths of the family and constructions--representations--of actual families. The study considers works of fiction, nonfiction, and photography which are characterized by similar documentary methods and goals. It is organized according to three interconnected topics as they were presented by writers and photographers during the decade in question: the reactions of male heads of household to widespread unemployment and financial insecurity; the changing roles of wives and mothers both in and out of the home during a time of economic hardship; and the experiences of children and young adults in a society which provided limited opportunity and promise for the future. Issues of work and poverty are important subtexts of this analysis, given the Depression's effects on society in the way of unemployment, bank failures, homelessness, and destitution. The dissertation concludes with an examination of documentary constructions of "otherness" which are based on class and race, and illustrates how images of family were used to qualify or otherwise influence these concepts of otherness and difference.

This dissertation examines the achievements of Spanish prose fiction in the last two decades and focuses mainly in the works of Luis Mateo Diez, Luis Landero and Antonio Munoz Molina. These authors, as well as many others, reapproach the Civil War and the Post War period with a different technique than their predecessors. Instead of employing social realism or experimentalism, they adopt new styles incorporating elements which have been absent from Peninsular literature for a long time, such as myth and fantasy. The study argues that the passage from realism to fantasy is part of the evolution of prose fiction as a genre. However, this development is triggered by social, cultural and historical events. Therefore, the analysis covers a historical review of the origins of the genre giving special attention to the mythical and chivalric aspects which contemporary novels borrow from the early works. The socio-cultural elements of the context are considered at the time the action takes place and also during the era in which the books were written. By combining these approaches one can bring out the literary truth of the texts which as claimed by Stephen Greenblatt is embedded in a text since its moment of conception. The literary truth of these fictions is that Spaniards have surpassed the historical division of the two Spains, and their efforts are now targeted at the search of new identities more according with individual subjectivity. This comprehensive analysis also enlightens the peculiar relationship between prose fiction and history.

This dissertation argues that widespread belief in a British national character is the result of the wide circulation of images purporting to depict its traits, and further, that audiences for those images have been no less important than image makers in determining what kind of character has been imagined. To support these contentions depictions of the British or English are examined, chosen mainly for their own wide circulation or that of their authors' work in general, but also for their derivation from earlier images in order to demonstrate the continuity of the nation's self-imagining. Apart from one sixteenth century text by Sir Walter Raleigh, the images examined are taken from British works of the last two centuries: in the nineteenth century from texts by Thomas Macaulay, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson, and paintings by Ford Madox Brown and John Everett Millais; in this century from texts by Sapper, Maud Diver, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Margaret Drabble and Salman Rushdie, political speeches by Margaret Thatcher, T. E. Utley and Britain's current chancellor Gordon Brown, and the 1980s re-enactment of Raleigh's activities known as Operation Raleigh. Reference is also made throughout to other contemporaneous images in a variety of media. Discussion draws on post-colonial theory and on theories of nations and nationalism and of narrative and historiography, with a predominantly Marxist approach. Although authors' motives for designedly portraying the national character have quite personal, even, at times, irrational aspects, they are primarily ideological. Motivation is, however, largely irrelevant to the images' reception, which mainly depends on their appeal, availability and general circulation. In conclusion, the construction and proclamation of a supposed national character is seen to be a continuing process which provides the nation's members with an acceptable collective self-image adapted to concerns of the time. Largely stereotypical, inevitably idealized and fraught with ideology, such collective representations incorporate much that is true but differ considerably from prevailing national norms of attitude and behavior. One or another such representation has nevertheless been embraced by a very large number of Britons as embodying their national character.

This dissertation seeks to argue that the vast majority of Black South African writers were no neutral sitters on the fence under apartheid rule. Each generation of Black writers assiduously and consciously deployed different genres and techniques in recording the plight of their people during years and years of subjugation under Nationalist rule. However, for each generation of committed Black South African writers the objectives were essentially consistent: to inspire, record and aid revolt against an unjust system which had been universally condemned as a crime against humanity. This dissertation is a story about the engagement of Black South African writing with its political context. It is also a journey back of sorts, because the Black writers who are at its core take us back to different phases and seasons of our shameful past as a fractured society. They take us through the consequences of the Land Act of 1913, which is universally regarded as one of the world's infamous acts of social engineering; they take us back to the notorious Bantu Education Act and its tragic consequences. In the early years of consolidating democracy in South Africa, there must be a galvanizing and self-critical vision of the goals of our society. Such a vision in turn requires a clear-sighted grasp of what was wrong in the past. It is indeed a blind progeny that acts without indebtedness to the past. The composition and orientation of Black writers who constitute this dissertation are eclectic. The dissertation draws heavily on the writings of world-renowned luminaries such as Es'kia Mphahlele, Wally Serote, Mbulelo Mzamane and Njabulo Ndebele. This dissertation falls squarely under the Citizenship Studies rubric and seeks to argue further that the Nationalists' vision of citizenship was seriously flawed because it was exclusive, violent, sectional and rooted in bigotry and racism. The task of reconstructing the post-apartheid society is going to involve massive acts of interpretation in which the historical memory will be a crucial factor.

As I maintain throughout my study of the legacy of anxious antebellum white constructions of the ‘bad nigger’ trope, public sphere discourses too often deny African males access to the deliberations of civil society. Thus, I discuss the anxious public sphere discourses that created the antebellum ‘bad nigger,’ the ‘black beast’ rapist, and the violent ‘coon’ of Progressive Era popular song. However, my primary focus is the social, cultural, and historical circumstances that identify the assumption of negative identity as a form, however problematic, of masculinist African American oppositional discourse. Thus, I combine linguistic, cultural, and historical analyses to provide an ontological reading of the connection between African American appropriations of hate speech and the formation of counterpublics. I consider African American appropriation of the antebellum ‘bad nigger’ trope, construction of the ‘badman’ during the Progressive Era, construction of the ‘super bad’ masculinist African American hero during the 1970s, and the ascendancy of the ‘real nigga’ of hip-hop culture. To investigate some of the ways African American males and publics react to the imputation of negative masculine identities adequately, I pay particular attention to counterdiscourses embedded in African American folklore, literature, film, and popular music. The significance of these cultural forms to the shaping of some African American counterpublic discourses is great. On one hand, these forms allow specific African American concerns to be circulated within a larger public sphere in a fashion that exposes the ill effects of being denied access to civil society. The oppositional stance of these forms shapes and reflects African American counterpublic discourse. On the other hand, widespread public culture representations of figures similar to the antebellum ‘bad nigger’ call the usefulness of these figures to broad African American publics into question. This inquiry also shapes African American counterpublics. Thus, I come to question the efficacy of using this seemingly intractable and definitely problematic figure to shape and promote counterpublic discourses. Another question looms over this text, however. What circumstances must arise so these figures will becomes less culturally and rhetorically relevant? I hope I have provided details that will lead to potential answers.