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Catherine Clément, in <I>The Newly Born Woman</I>, regards 'magic, spectacle and illness' as the performance of the feminine. In studying the narratives of masquerading and miming women, these are the images which I locate: the magic of the sorceress, the spectacle of the transvestites or the illness of the hysteric. Within this thesis, I study instances of masquerade or mimicry, and their influence upon gender identity, in a selection of texts by nineteenth century women written for a particularly feminine audience: <I>Belinda</I> (1801) by Maria Edgeworth, <I>Lady Audley's Secret </I>(1861) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, <I>The Chase, Or, A Long Fatal Love Chase</I> (1866) by Louisa Alcott, <I>Through One Administration</I> (1883) and <I>The Secret Garden</I> (1913), both by Frances Hodgson Burnett. My approach is neither historical nor chronological. Moving away from historicising the masquerade, I mirror the fate of the masked occasion in history: its attenuation and sublimation inside the domestic. Rather than focusing on contextuality, I concentrate on textuality. The interiorised nature of that performance demands that my approach becomes theoretical, and in particular, psychoanalytic, given that both the masquerade and psychoanalysis deals with gender as construction and representation. By resisting chronology, I can express a reluctance to assume a progression towards a 'truth' or 'reality' and allow the masquerade to remain complex. Primarily I am interested in examining the 'theatrical' representation of the various female bodies written into the narratives. However, I am also concerned with textual masquerade/mime: whether the novels studied operate within a system of masquerade or mimicry and whether the discursive impulse is one of the capitulation or subversion. As I read femininity as performance, or as spectacle, constructed by a masculine audience, and represented by the feminine, I question the area 'behind-the-mask', and what lies there - indeed, whether it is possible to articulate it.

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This thesis considers the novels of Carlos Fuentes from a thematic point of view, as well as looking at the place of the writer in Mexican narrative tradition. It also presents a brief history of the Mexican novel.

The purpose of this thesis is to point out the romantic elements in five of Frank Norris's novels.

While his Transcendentalist contemporaries were expounding their optimistic philosophy of natural goodness, progress, and perfectibility, Hawthorne probed into the human heart, recording the darkest motives of his characters and writing bitter criticism of life. Around him men were declaring that scientific inventions, political organizations, and religious reforms were ushering in a new era; but Hawthorne viewed the new society as a probable continuation of old evils and a manufacturer of new ones. His fiction has been called "an elaborate study of the centrifugal, . . . a dramatization of all those social and psychological forces that lead to disunion, fragmentation, dispersion, incoherence. Critics generally comment on Hawthorne's obsession with guilt. His pessimistic analysis of the mind, his somber outlook on living, and his personal tendency to solitude are frequently credited to his Puritan ancestry; yet as Arvin points out, "He had no more Puritan blood than Emerson and hundreds of other New Englanders of his time: and who will say that they were obsessed with the spectral presence of guilty. One must go beyond Calvinist theology to comprehend the source of guilt that hovers over the pages of his fiction. His religious, moral, educational, and economic background was so typical of his time and locality that one can hardly believe that the nature of his writing or thinking could have been determined by these factors. Indeed, his imperviousness to contemporary influences causes one to look intensely at his personal life in searching for the explanation of the Hawthorne enigma. An important influence on his writing was his prolonged association with women. From his life in a feminine world and his reaction to that world, he devised the major part of his style, themes, and feminine character types. A review of the facts of his biography will establish the nature of the influence that dominated him as a man and as a writer. And an analysis of his fiction will indicate the extent of that influence on his writing. Although this study will necessarily begin with a review of his life, this thesis is not another biography; for Hawthorne already has a large number of biographers. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literary influence of his mother, sisters, wife, daughters, and women acquaintances, with particular emphasis on their relation to his themes, style, and character types.

This study is based upon a comprehensive survey of Leslie Mitchell's written work. This includes letters, manuscripts, rare material and stories and articles which have not teen cited before, as well as the fiction and non-fiction which was published under either his own name or the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. In Part One, I examine the main ideas at play in this body of work and conclude that there are two primary ones: these are considered under the terms which Mitchell used to compliment Quetzalcoatl, a legendary figure from ancient American history. These two ideological impulses are personal to Mitchell, and yet both are in sympathy with modern intellectual developments. His political ideas are considered under the term "reformer", which concisely reflects his radical sympathies, his interest in anarchism and communism, and in political movements of a universal scope. The germ of Mitchell's philosophy lies in the word "blasphemer". Firmly opposed to the theist stance, he wavered between an angst-ridden scepticism and a romantic form of pantheism; but in his most mature work, he finds a happy medium between these poles, ultimately providing a vision of a religious character which is based upon empirical principles. In a separate subchapter, I investigate Mitchell's relationship with diffusionist theory as a secondary influence. In Part Two, I turn my attention to the fiction, paying particular attention to the beliefs of the "reformer" and the "blasphemer" as they are manifested in his stories and novels. The study of the shorter fiction is the most comprehensive to date, dealing with rare stories and work which has not been considered previously. Yet although Mitchell's personal philosophy can be seen developing in the English stories, it is more fully implicated in the Scottish ones, of which 'Clay' and 'Forsaken' are the finest, the former as the creation of the mature "blasphemer", and the letter as the work of the mature "reformer". The major fiction is equally variable. The early novels are artistically immature but intellectually stimulating, and the invigorating; realism and profundity of the Empirical fiction makes the Imaginative Romances appear anaemic in comparison. Spartacus is undoubtedly the finest Mitchell novel, and in it the "reformer" capitalizes upon the achievement of the "blasphemer", presentingradica-1 political involvement as the only positive-exercise in an otherwise meaningless life. However, A Scots Quair is Mitchell's masterpiece, a unique experimental novel in which the author's political and philosophical ideas come to full fruition. Dealing positively with the major themes of life, with the search for political solutions and for spiritual fulfilment, its appeal is timeless.

This thesis is a second draft of a novel about an orphaned girl and boy, Kate and Penn, who befriend one another on a Midwestern college campus and discover belonging and a sense of self, as well as a fantastical quality they both possess called Influence. The story explores themes of family, friendship, community, fear culture, and adult identity. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection