This dissertation peruses the question of alienation through two short stories by the local writer Hon Lai-chu. The first objective is to delineate the exact form and content that the phenomenon of alienation assumes, its particularity in specific spatio-temporal settings, and the necessary relation of it to space and people within the contexts. At the centre of my materialist analysis lies a deprivation of what I call the right to space, and concomitant resistance by the narrators. The clarification of the specificity of alienation helps an understanding of it in and beyond any (con) text: It is but one form of an exploitative logic, of man imposed on man. Thus the urgent task now is as much to trace the various major ramifications of human exploitation, in different cultures across different periods, through which the nature of human condition can be gauged, as to pave a way to articulation of localisms instead of Localism, with respect to the situation of Hong Kong. The second objective so registers a refusal of a reductive and totalizing rubric of describing our city. I instead seek to ascribe the validity of this description to the average person. It is through their actions and voices in everyday life that they regain, however briefly, the right to space, and therewith constitute personal resistance which I give the name localisms. / published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (M.A.) in French--University of Maine, 2009. / Includes vita. Abstract, table of contents in French and English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-99).

Thesis (M.A.) in English--University of Maine, 2008. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-100).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, April 2007.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 342-357). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duquesne University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-222).

The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Melbourne, 1995. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-319).

No description available.