This dissertation examines the non-literary and non-aesthetic reasons underlying the bias in favor of realism in the formation of the traditional literary canon of nineteenth-century British fiction. Since English literature first became a recognized academic discipline in Great Britain in the 1870s and '80s, the study of fiction has been (with few exceptions) a study of realistic fiction. College survey courses in the period usually teach W. M. Thackeray through Thomas Hardy, but almost never make excursions into the fantasy fiction of Victorians like George MacDonald or Charles Kingsley. My thesis is that this exclusion can best be explained by examining the role of the Anglican Church as well as that of Non-Conformist or Dissenting evangelical sects in the educational institutions of nineteenth-century Britain in the first half of the century, and by examining the function that the academic study of English literature played in British imperialist ideology in the latter part of the century. Both Church and Empire needed a canon of realism to promote their own brand of conservative ideology, although each tended to define realism differently. Victorian fantasy writers often targeted Church doctrine or imperial dogma for especially satirical treatment, thus insuring their own exclusion from the universities which were run by the Church and operated to supply patriotic administrators to the Empire. My study examines in detail the ecclesiastical and political context of educational philosophy and how this context affected reading curriculum and ultimately, the canon. My study also examines in detail the lives and historical situations of five Victorian fantasy writers: John Ruskin, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Henry Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling. Ruskin, MacDonald and Kingsley used fantasy as a means of attacking various branches of organized Christianity. Haggard and Kipling used fantasy as a means of attacking various aspects of popular imperial rhetoric. Throughout the dissertation, I situate the writers' novels within their historical contexts to show why fantasy fiction has traditionally been ignored or denigrated by academic critics.

In the preface to this collection, "Poetry and History: Finding 'What Will Suffice,'" I show how Czeslaw Milosz's "Dedication" and Jorie Graham's "Guantánamo" embody the virtues of philosophical meditation and the moral imagination to create a unique poetry of witness. These poems also provide American poets with an example of how they can regain the trust of an apathetic general reading audience. Tinder for the Bathhouses is a collection of poems in which I use the moral imagination to indirectly bear witness to events as far ranging as the Holocaust and the Iraq War. Using the family as a foundation, I show how historical narratives can provide a poet with the tools to think about larger metaphysical questions that poetry can raise, such as the nature of beauty and the purpose of art.

In the commercial theaters of early modern London there worked a group of dramatists who, though they wrote for the playmaking industry, were not members of it. Rather than outliers in a unified, closed field of playwriting, they were amateur dramatists, a distinct class of writers who took advantage of the radically open nature of the field of playwriting for professional theaters to supply their own plays to the actors. Their plays require a different set of critical and historical questions than that traditionally used in examining plays by professionals. The reason for this distinction is that amateur dramatists came to their work with primary experience of the theater as cultural consumers rather than producers: they were playgoers who, though from a diverse range of economic and social backgrounds, shared a passion for the public stage—a passion that they translated into efforts to pen plays for that same stage. As plays by playgoers, their texts provide evidence for better understanding how particular audience members saw and understood the professional stage. Their plays reveal directly what audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. In their attempts to replicate specific practices, conventions, and techniques that they saw in professionals' plays, they reveal how certain playgoers understood, or thought they understood, the professional theater. In their deviations from what they saw in professionals' plays, they testify to a gap between what the profession produced and what the audience wanted—a gap unnoticed by studies of audience experience that rely on professionals' plays to recreate that experience. Playgoers writing their own plays demonstrate that the early modern audience was a participatory, engaged, and even autonomously active force of dramatic creation. In the early modern professional theater, playgoers could create the texts and, in some cases, the performances that they desired. Reading amateurs' plays with an awareness that they were written not just for audiences but also by audiences thus opens a new window onto the early modern playhouse, the diversity of dramatists who wrote for it, and the creative experiences of the spectators who attended it.

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Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

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Fictional Constructions of Grey Street by Selected South African Indian Writers. This thesis explores the fictional constructions of Grey Street by selected South African Indian writers to establish a deeper understanding of the connection between writers, place and identity in the South African Indian context. The concepts of 'place' and 'space' are of particular importance to this thesis. Michel Foucault's (1980) theories on space and power, Frantz Fanon's (1952) work on the connection between race and spatial politics, and Pierre Bourdieu's (1990) concept of 'habitus' are drawn on in this thesis in order to understand the ramifications of the spatial segregation of different race groups in colonial and apartheid South Africa. The specific kind of place focused on in this thesis is the city. Foucault's (1977, 1980) theorisation of the Panopticon is used to explain the apartheid government's panoptic planning of the South African city. As a counterpoint to this notion of panoptic urban ordering, Jonathan Raban's Soft City (1974), Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the city" (1984) and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (2002) are analysed to explore an alternative way of engaging with city space. These theorists privilege the perspective of the walker in the city, suggesting that the city cannot be governed by top-down urban planning as it is constantly being re-made by the city's pedestrians on the ground. The South African city is an interesting site for a study of this kind as it has, since the colonial era, been an intensely contested space. This dissertation looks primarily at the South African Indian experience of the city of Durban which is a characteristically diasporic one. The theories of diasporic culture by Vijay Mishra (1996) and Avtar Brah (1996) form the foundation for a discussion of the Indian diasporas in the South African colonial and apartheid urban context. Two major Indian diasporic groups are identified: the old Indian diasporas and the new Indian diasporas. Each group experiences the city in different ways which is important in this study which looks at how different Indian diasporic experiences of the city shape the construction of Grey Street in fiction. One of the arenas in which diasporic histories are played out, and thus colonial, nationalist histories are challenged, is the space of fiction, Fiction provides diasporic groups with a textual space in which to record, and thus freeze, their collective memories; memories that are vital in challenging the hegemonic 'nationalist' collective memories often imposed on them. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase's (1989) work on nostalgia is useful in this thesis which proposes that the collective memories of diasporic groups are quintessentially nostalgic. This is significant as the fictional constructions of place in the primary texts selected are remembered and re-membered through a nostalgic lens. The fictional works selected for this thesis include Imraan Coovadia's The Wedding (2001) and Aziz Hassim's The Lotus People (2002). Although other Indian writers have represented Grey Street in their works, including Kesevaloo Goonam in Coolie Doctor (1991), Phyllis Naidoo in Footprints in Grey Street (2002), Mariam Akabor in Flat 9 (2006) and Ravi Govender in Down Memory Lane (2006), the two novels selected respond most fully to the theories raised in this thesis. However, the other texts are referred to in relation to the selected texts in order to get a fuller picture of the Indian South African perspective of Grey Street. The selected primary texts are analysed in this dissertation in their historical context and therefore a brief history of Indians in South Africa is provided. The time period covered ranges from 1886 with the arrival of the first Indian indentured labourers to Natal to present day. Although this thesis focuses largely on the past and present experiences of Indian South Africans in Grey Street, questions are raised regarding future directions in Indian writing in the area. Thus, attention is also given to forthcoming novels by Hassim, Coovadia and Akabor. Research such as I am proposing can contribute to the debate on the cultural representation of urban space in South Africa and hopefully stimulate further studies of Indian literary production centered on writers, place and identity in the country. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.

Critical analysis of the theme “Colonisation” in the literary works of Africa: case of Ngemena by Lomami Tchibamba and La Malédiction by Ngandu Nkashama is the title of this thesis. I intend to do a critical analysis of the “colonialism” in African literature with specific reference to Congo. Some African writers, such as Mongo Beti in Pauvre Christ de Bomba, Benjamin Matip in Afrique! Nous t’ignorons, Ferdinand Oyono in Une Vie de boy and so forth made interesting criticisms of colonisation in the continent. But for their part, in spite of the similarity with the other novels, Ngemena and La Malédiction are directly focused on central Africa especially on the country of Congo. The authors mentioned above describe in their novels the effects of colonisation on religious, political and social aspects; meanwhile, in Ngemena, Lomami Tchibamba speaks about the critical periods of his country, Congo: the occupation as well as its effects. This book covers almost the period from 1908 to 1960, which was a very troubled time. But in La Malédiction, Ngandu Nkashama speaks about the deep exploitation of indigenous population in the hard labour in mines. Normally, the two novels Ngemena and La Malédiction complete each other by their relation of facts. Nevertheless, we can say that colonization and negritude are themes well exploited by researchers and authors alike in the second part of the 20th century. In fact, many authors wrote about colonization and their criticisms were rich as well as strong. But sometimes, some of them expressed their opinion in an emotional way so that the content became far from the truth. It is why, Wilberforce Umezinwa in La religion dans la littérature africaine says, in order to render the history most interesting, the narrators are prone to exaggeration: The prose and poetry do not speak generally kindly about the relationship between Africans and Europeans; but these works are filled with a bad mood against Europe, the continent of the missionaries, slave drivers, and colonialists. The relationship Between Europe and Africa is a song of Blues, a song on human distresses (Umezinwa, 1975: 13) (Own translation). Then, the African writer has an essential role in the society: to tell the history with neither bad mood nor exaggeration but with humour, as indicated by Lilyan Kesteloot. In Négritude et situation coloniale, she underlines that African authors write very emotionally when they explain the notion of Colonisation and Négritude. Sartre quoted by the same Lilyan Kesteloot mentioned that this fact is “racism anti-racism” (Kesteloot, 1968: 35, 43). Especially in Ngemena, from time to time, the author goes over the top and makes an exaggeration. In its introduction, Ngemena takes the form of an admonitory part and is written with burning eloquence. It is likely that Lomami Tchibamba had serious hopes of persuading the readers, the Congolese people, of the multiple and hard realities during the colonization period, then implicitly he pushes people to a form of vengeance. But instead of this, the main goal remains: Lomami Tshibamba always keeps his principal theme and responds to many preoccupations such as : -Who is the colonizer? -Why did he come to the country? -How did he convince the indigenous people so that he got in? -What were the circumstances of his entering? By its part in La Malédiction, Ngandu Nkashama tells the atrocity committed by the colonisation in the remote province of Kasai (Bakwanga), particularly, in the diamond mines. The novels such as Citadelle d’espoir by Ngandu Nkashama, Bel Immonde by Valentin Yves Mudimbe, Cité 15 by Charles Djungu Simba, and some articles like “L’affaire Lumumba ou la palabre sur l’indépendance au Congo” of Jean Omasombo Tshonda in Congo Meuse are steeped in the colonial and postcolonial history of Congo and this study, of course, will emphasize many aspects of the colonisation: political, sociological, religious and psychological. To analyse the correlation between the two periods of crucial time in Congo will be the most interesting aspect of this work. Therefore, the novels: Le Vieux nègre et la médaille and Une Vie de Boy of Ferdinand Oyono, La Vie et demie of Sony Labou Tansi, La Ville cruelle of Mongo Beti will be helpful to this framework in illuminating the way of social and religious aspects. Thus, an analysis and interpretation of theses novels constitute a support of large dimension to my study. Furthermore, Ngemena is a book published in 1981 and La Malédiction in 1981 (the same year); the stories seem ancient but keep their originality because of the exploited theme. It is a true historical legacy. In this way, Ngemena and La Malédiction could be considered as “vademecum” and must be read by whoever wants to know and understand the entire topic of colonization in Congo. Their contents confer to them the value of “true teaching books” of the ancient colonial structures. In short, their stories enlighten the long past colonial history; they have a profound didactic value. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

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