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The final decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first witnessed a surge of published novels with direct and indirect connection to the Victorian era, at a time when a focus on the new millenium might have been expected. This proliferation of what came to be termed 'neo-Victorian novels' shows no sign of abating and has now given rise to scholarly research on the subject. The principal aim of this thesis is to examine the rise of the neo-Victorian novel during the period in question. After an introduction which situates the phenomenon within relevant theoretical and cultural contexts, the following chapter attempts to provide a sense of the thematic range of neo-Victorian novels through an original 'catalogue' of more than one hundred neo-Victorian novels, adopting the received neo-Victorian theoretical stance which believes that what neo-Victorian novels write about demonstrates contemporary concerns and contemporary attitudes to the Victorian as much as it attempts an accurate portrayal of a historical period. This is followed by three further chapters which focus on different structural forms in presenting 'Victorian' material: the pastiche, the split narrative and the re-write versions of the neo-Victorian novel. A core contention of the thesis is that the comparison of three different novel forms, allied to the examination of thematic areas of interest, exposes the contradictory impulse which lies at the heart of the neo-Victorian enterprise. While the continuing popularity of neo-Victorian fictions indicates a desire for a sense of continuing connection to Victorian forbears, imagined or actual, the insistence on plots which play to modern interests and sensibilities suggests that the Victorians have to 'fit' with us rather than the other way round. The various forms that the neo-Victorian novel adopts carry their own postmodern means of undermining the credibility of the Victorian world under construction.

This thesis investigates two of the most important themes concerning women’s problems that have been tackled by Saudi female novelists between 1958-2011 with special attention to the development of their thoughts about the issues from stage to stage. To investigate the two powers over women explored in Saudi women’s novels, the works have been divided into four separate and important stages and each stage has its own thematic and stylistic charactersics. The thesis consists of seven chapters starting with an Introduction, in which the importance of studying the subject is detailed; the theortical framework and the methodology of this study is also discussed. A section is devoted to reviewing previous studies of the Saudi novel in general, as well as studies published on the women’s novel. The status of women in Saudi society is discussed in Chapter Two which covers the structure of Saudi society, women’s education, women’s employment and the effects on the status of women in Saudi Arabia of the events of September 11th, 2001. The other four chapters are divided according to the stages of development of Saudi women’s novels. In each chapter, two novels are analysed: the first novel represents the first theme examined in the thesis, which is the authority of society over women. The second novel represents the second theme, which is the Saudi novelists’ vision regarding the relationships between the sexes in Saudi society. In addition, a section in each chapter is devoted to an examination of the characteristic of the themes in each stage by comparing and contrasting sample novels with the case study novels. The conclusion summarises the most important points of this research with reference to the findings of this study. It also suggests some further research in the field of Saudi literature.

This thesis comprises the opening of a novel-in-progress, which takes place in an alternate universe where certain ordinary humans are born with superpowers. One superpowered public hero, Captain Frost, attempts to save a notorious, superpowered criminal called the Terror, in the hopes of interrogating him about a recent spate of superhero deaths—but the Terror’s sudden death casts doubt on Frost’s ability to handle the case. Meanwhile, a team of powered and non-powered criminals, among them a scientist who calls himself Dr. Fiend, scheme to fill the power vacuum left by the Terror. Dr. Fiend commits to a break-in that will allow him to examine the Terror’s body for evidence of how he was able to repeatedly defeat Frost and how his strategy and skills might be used to undermine Frost’s control of the city.

Master of Science - Science / Normal colonic epithelium bombarded by a range of molecular changes, affecting cell proliferation and apoptosis, result in the initiation of an adenoma and consequently an invasive carcinoma, which is usually lethal. One of the main characteristics of tumour progression is the loss of regulation between the cell cycle and apoptosis. Under normal circumstances, these processes are strictly controlled by a number of regulators and inhibitors. Previous studies have implicated the novel Domain With No Name gene in apoptosis. This study aimed to characterize the expression patterns and levels of the gene in colon cancer and to determine its role in apoptosis. In situ hybridisation, immunocytochemistry and quantitative PCR localised the gene and its products in cancerous and normal colon tissue. Combined with apoptosis detection studies, proliferation assays and Bcl-2 assays, the results suggest that the gene is involved in promoting apoptosis in cancerous cells i.e. the targeting of undesirable cells. Helicobacter pylorus was implicated in the progression of noninvasive colon cancer to the invasive state. From this study DWNN is proposed to be a pro-apoptotic participant in programmed cell death and classification studies such as these allow for potential manipulation of the apoptotic system to serve as a therapeutic corridor.

Tabou réputé universel, l'inceste constitue un thème littéraire protéiforme et ancien. Pour le spécialiste du romantisme Peter Thorslev, l'intérêt de la littérature pour ce motif est dû à sa puissance dramatique, car il met en scène le désir d’un individu contre la société. Cette conception, juste pour décrire la tradition romantique passée, ne rend pas compte de la complexité des fictions romanesques abordant l’inceste à partir du XXe siècle. La « multiplication des discours sur le sexe dans le champ d’exercice du pouvoir lui-même » que décrit Foucault et le développement des politiques racistes et eugénistes font que l’inceste s'intrique en effet à un autre concept polémique : la « race ». L'écriture romanesque de ce thème ne concerne plus un individu en butte contre la société mais des groupes cherchant à se définir, et le plus souvent racialement. La confrontation aux incestueux décrit une limite symbolique incertaine non pas tant entre civilisation et barbarie qu'entre bon citoyen et non-citoyen. Aux États-Unis et en Afrique du Sud où les fictions politiques de la nation érigée en famille idéale ont servi à justifier l'exclusion de la population non-blanche, ce que nous appelons les « contre-fictions d'inceste » interrogent de façon provocante la citoyenneté et le droit dans ces États. Le motif de l'inceste, fantasmé ou accompli, est étudié dans des romans datés de 1929 à 2005 et écrits entre autres par W. Faulkner, T. Morrison, R. Ellison, G. Jones, Sapphire aux États-Unis et par D. Lessing, B. Head, A. Dangor, M. van Niekerk, L. Rampolokeng en Afrique du Sud. Nous retraçons l'évolution du traitement esthétique et politique de l'inceste dans les romans de ces pays marqués par l'association entre communauté, nation et « race », et réfléchissons dans le même temps à la réalité omniprésente de ce crime dans nos sociétés. / Incest, a notorious universal taboo, is an ancient protean theme in literature. According to Peter Thorslev, writers are drawn to this theme because of its powerful dramatization of the conflict between an individual's desire and that of the society. This theory is applicable to the past tradition of romanticism, but it doesn't take into account the complexity of incest fictions written in Twentieth-century novels. The «proliferation of discourses on sex within the context of power itself » described by Foucault, along with the development of the politics of race and eugenics, explain how the incest theme is intertwined with another controversial concept : « race ». Novels no longer depict an individual fighting against society when they portray incest, but they think of human groups trying to define themselves, often by way of race. Confronting incestuous characters is not a means of drawing an obscure symbolic line between the civilized and the savages, but among citizens and non-citizens. In South Africa and the United States of America, where political fictions had defined the nation as a perfect family to justify the exclusion of non-white people from the community of citizens, « counter-fictions of incest » examine in provocative ways how citizenship and rights are articulated. I question the incest theme – forbidden desire or sexual violation– in novels from 1929 to 2005, by American writers such as W. Faulkner, T. Morrison, R. Ellison, G. Jones, Sapphire and by South African authors like D. Lessing, B. Head, A. Dangor, M. van Niekerk, and L. Rampolokeng. I outline the aesthetic and political evolution of the incest theme in novels written in those societies where community, nation and « race » were particularly interconnected, while simultaneously reflecting on the omnipresent reality of the crime of incest in all societies.

Thesis advisor: Laura Tanner / In "Everyday Speech" Maurice Blanchot eloquently articulates the long held and often rehearsed notion that the everyday eludes representation. Yet, in recent years, literary and cultural studies scholars have begun to explore the limitations of this conception. Monotonous Feeling contributes to this burgeoning conversation by examining three Modern and Contemporary novels that take the everyday's resistance to representation not at a cue for aesthetic transformation but for formal innovation. It argues that Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Marilynne Robinson's Home, which each define the everyday as a mode of taken-for-granted or distracted attention, use formal techniques to make manifest the monotonous attentions of the everyday in order to make us feel what in the formal and affective limitations of our aesthetic approaches we cannot know. In arousing and making use of feelings that we so often regard as signals of a fractured meaning making process, these novels invite, even push, us to consider the value of everyday felt states that might structure our narratives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This research is focused on finding new secondary metabolites from bacterial sources through genome mining, allowing the study of unknown molecules that could be potential candidates for use as drugs against microbial infections, cancer, and immune diseases. Bioprospection was conducted through targeted environmental sampling, unusual environments exploration and molecular and computational biology. In the first project, an environmental DNA (eDNA) fosmid library from urban soil samples was built and arrayed for the presence of potential gene clusters. In total, 7% of the library was positive for the presence of secondary metabolite pathways. Sequencing revealed genetic similarity with other organisms that belong to urban areas, showing adaptation of the microbiota to anthropogenic environments. The second project focuses on the heterologous expression of a lantipeptide from a bacterial isolate from an urban environment. Using a Multigene Expression System (MES), different components of the biosynthetic pathway were cloned and expressed. We were able to successfully express the genes responsible for lantipeptide tailoring but the lantipeptide portion of the pathway was not obtained with the methods used. The last project examined cave bacterial secondary metabolite production and organism diversity to determine the relationship between the microbiome and to retrieve potential active natural compounds. Through sequence analysis and LC-ESI-HRMS, several metabolites were detected and their potential role for the cave microbiome could be established.

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