All bodies of critical discourse on any given literary canon seek visibility through self- celebration, subversion of competing critical ideas and identification with supposedly popular, scientific and incisive critical theories. Thus, the literary-critical quest for significance and visibility is, in essence, a quest for „space‟, „voice‟ and „authority‟ in the discussion of aspects of a given literary corpus. This research explores the politics of „space‟, „voice‟ and „authority‟ in „white critical thought‟ on „the black Zimbabwean novel‟. It unfolds in the context of the realisation that as a body of critical discourse on „the black Zimbabwean novel‟, „white critical thought‟ does not only emerge in an intellectual matrix in which it shares and competes for „space‟, „voice‟ and „authority‟ with other bodies of critical thought on the literary episteme in question; it also develops in the ambit of Euro-African cultural politics of hegemony and resistance. Thus, the research sets out to identify the ways in which „white critical thought‟ affirms and perpetuates or questions and negates European critical benchmarks and cultural models in the discussion of selected aspects of „the black Zimbabwean novel‟. The investigation considers the fissures at the heart of „white critical thought‟ as a critical discourse and the myriad of ways in which it interacts with competing critical discourses on the „the black Zimbabwean novel‟. It derives impetus from the fact that while other versions of critical thought on „the black Zimbabwean novel‟ have received extensive metacritical discussion elsewhere, „white critical thought‟ remains largely under-discussed. This phenomenon enables it to solidify into a settled body of critical thought. The metacritical discussion of „white critical thought‟ in this research constitutes part of the repertoire of efforts that will help check the solidification of critical discourses into hegemonic bodies of thought. The research makes use of Afrocentric and Postcolonial critical tenets to advance the contention that while „white critical thought‟ on „the black Zimbabwean novel‟ is fraught with fissures and contradictions that speak directly to its complexity and resistance to neat categorisation, it is largely vulnerable to identification as part of the paraphernalia of European cultural and intellectual hegemony in African literature and its criticism, given its tendency to discuss the literature outside the context of critical theories that emerge from the same culture and history with the literary corpus in question. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Le Mouvement de libération des femmes en France ne fut pas seulement un mouvement politique et social, ce fut également l’une des dernières, si ce n’est la dernière, avant-garde littéraire que la France a connue. Du point de vue international, l’activité des littératrices au sein du Mouvement constitue un des principes distinctifs de la lutte des femmes en France. Les manifestantes qui déposent publiquement une gerbe de fleurs à la femme plus inconnue encore que le soldat inconnu sous l’Arc de Triomphe le 26 août 1970, sont déjà pour certaines – appelées à le devenir pour d’autres – des écrivaines. Dix ans plus tard, le MLF, depuis peu marque déposée à l’Institut national de la propriété industrielle, appartient à une éditrice, Antoinette Fouque, promotrice d’une écriture dite féminine. Dans l’espace circonscrit par ces deux points fixes, paraît un ensemble de textes qui s’inscrivent au sein de deux tendances majoritaires – mais antagonistes – du Mouvement, le féminisme d’une part et la néo-féminité, ou éloge de la différence, d’autre part. En miroir, un double rhizome éditorial se développe, partageant maisons d’édition et revues en deux factions militantes et littéraires bien distinctes. Pendant dix ans, la littérature se met tout autant au service du Mouvement des femmes que le Mouvement irradie la littérature, chacun-e influençant et informant la pratique et la pensée de l’autre. C’est de cette coïncidence entre littérature et Mouvement de libération des femmes que le présent écrit se propose de rendre compte, afin de retracer un mouvement politique qui fut et se fit littéraire, et, dans le même élan, une littérature qui fut et se fit politique. Par là même, la thèse redouble la question posée par tout un mouvement de femmes à la littérature elle-même, contestant ses définitions premières et repoussant les limites qui lui ont été assignées. / The Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) was not only a political and social movement, but one of the last, if not the very last, literary avant-garde that France has experienced. From an international perspective, the activity of the literary women within the movement represents one of the fundamental principles of the fight for women’s rights in France. The demonstrators, who publicly placed a bouquet of flowers for the unknown wife of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe on August 26th 1970, are for some, and are soon to become for others, women writers. Ten years later, the MLF, a recently registered trademark with the National Institute for Intellectual Property Rights, belongs to the editor, Antoinette Fouque, promotor of female writing. Within the space determined by these two fixed points, there exists a collection of texts that adhere to two major trends – although antagonistic – of the movement, Feminism on one hand and Neofeminity, or the praise for “difference”, on the other hand. Mirroring each other, a dual editorial form develops, sharing publishers and scholarly journals, into two distinct literary and militant factions. For ten years, literature served the purpose of the Women’s Liberation Movement as much as the latter promoted literature, each influencing and informing the other by practice and thought. It is precisely this coexistence between literature and the Women’s Liberation Movement that the present dissertation proposes to examine, in order to trace the political movement that was and made itself literary, and, by the same token, a literature that was and made itself political. At the same time, the dissertation continues the question asked of literature by an entire women’s movement, challenging its assigned definitions and pushing back its boundaries.

"Rum, Rome, and Rebellion: The Reform of Reform in the Political Fiction of the Gilded Age" examines a collection of American political novelists who were active during the mid- to late-nineteenth century. These writers were not only active in politics, they also used their experience in politics to compose realist fiction that typically contained a great deal of humor and satire. Despite their different backgrounds, each of these writers challenged the literary and political conventions of Romanticism, championing ironic detachment and cosmopolitanism. Although fiction about quotidian political life rarely achieves canonical status, such literature has always enjoyed a large readership, both in the nineteenth-century and in our own time. This dissertation attempts to untangle why we find (or don’t find) literature about quotidian political life entertaining and/or instructive, while also providing insight into this transitional period in American history. Each chapter concentrates on the fifty-year period between 1848 and 1898 from a different location, forming what are essentially four cross-sectional samples. This serves two interconnected purposes. One, it reorients the periodization of American literature and history away from 1865 by highlighting cultural continuities between the periods before and after the Civil War And two, it serves to highlight the integration of American literature, culture, and politics, with the broader, nineteenth-century Atlantic world, where the year 1865 carries less cultural significance. The first chapter begins in the nation's capital and examines the anti-populist liberalism of Henry Adams and John Hay. From Washington, we move north to New England where we encounter Henry James’s Bostonians. With the exception of Lionel Trilling, few major critics have championed James’s "middle period," which provides quasi-ethnographic sketches of political movements on both sides of the Atlantic. I reveal James’s long-standing fascination and engagement with the political analyses of Alexis de Tocqueville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his friend, Henry Adams. I show how the novel anticipates George Santayana’s notion of "the genteel tradition" which dominated northern American culture during this period. After examining two canonical figures, I turn my attention in a more southerly direction, to two lesser known authors. The first is Maria Ruiz de Burton, a Mexican writer from the Southwestern Borderlands who immigrated to the U.S. after the Mexican-American War. Ruiz de Burton has primarily been read as a proto-Chicana/o author, but I view her as a cosmopolitan whose observations about American culture and politics resemble those of James and Santayana. My last chapter is set in Louisiana, where we encounter and recover an eccentric, Spanish-Creole politician and author named Charles Gayarré and his 1856 novel The School for Politics, a satire of local machine politics. Largely forgotten today, Gayarré was connected to intellectual circles in both Europe and Latin America, and was acquainted with American writers like Herman Melville and Henry Adams. I relate The School for Politics with his later political novels in which anti-imperialism and a pluralistic plea for the tolerance of ethnic minorities also implicitly serve as an apology for racial segregation in the Jim Crow South.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Although many of Lola Ridge's poems champion the causes of minorities and the disenfranchised, it is too easy to state that politics were the sole reason for her neglect. A simple look at well-known female poets who often wrote about social or political issues during Ridge's lifetime, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Muriel Rukeyser, weakens such a claim. Furthermore, Ridge's five books of poetry illustrate that many of her poems focused on themes beyond the political or social. The decisions by critics to focus on selections of Ridge's poems that do not display her ability to employ multiple aesthetics in her poetry have caused them to present her work one-dimensionally. Likewise, politically motivated critics often overlook aesthetic experiments that poets like Ridge employ in their poetry. Few poets during Ridge's time made use of such drastically varied styles, and because her work resists easy categorization (as either traditional or avant-garde), her poetry has largely gone unnoticed by modern scholars. Chapter two of my thesis focuses on a selection Ridge's social and political poems and highlights how Ridge's social poetry coupled with the multiple aesthetics she employed has played a part in her critical neglect. My findings will open up the discussion of Ridge's poetry and situate her work both politically and aesthetically, something no critic has yet attempted. Chapter three examines Ridge’s role as editor of Modern School, Others and Broom. Ridge's work for these magazines, particularly Others and Broom, places her at the center of American modernism. My examination of Ridge's social poetry and her role as editor for two leading literary magazines, in conjunction with her use of multiple aesthetics, will build a strong case for why her work deserves to be recovered.

Rex Stout maintained his popular readership despite the often controversial and radical political content expressed in his detective fiction. His political ideals often made him many enemies. Stances such as his ardent opposition to censorship, racism, Nazism, Germany, Fascism, Communism, McCarthyism, and the unfettered FBI were potentially offensive to colleagues and readers from various political backgrounds. Yet Stout attempted to present radical messages via the content of his detective fiction with subtlety. As a literary traditionalist, he resisted using his fiction as a platform for an often extreme political agenda. Where political messages are apparent in his work, Stout employs various techniques to mute potentially offensive messages. First, his hugely successful bantering Archie Goodwin-Nero Wolfe detective duo—a combination of both the lippy American and the tidy, sanitary British detective schools—fosters exploration, contradiction, and conflict between political viewpoints. Archie often rejects or criticizes Wolfe's extreme political viewpoints. Second, Stout utilizes the contradictions between values that occur when the form of detective fiction counters his radical political messages. This suggests that the form of detective fiction (in this case the conventional patterns and attitudes reinforced by the genre) is as important as the content (in this case the muted political message or the lack of overt politics) in reinforcing or shaping political, economic, moral, and social viewpoints. An analysis of the novels The Black Mountain (1954) and The Doorbell Rang (1965) and the novellas "Not Quite Dead Enough" and "Booby Trap" (1944) from Stout's Nero Wolfe series demonstrates his use of detective fiction for both the expression of political viewpoints and the muting of those political messages.

This thesis examines the increasing sophistication of sixteenth-century French literary engagement with Virgil's Aeneid. It argues that successive forms of engagement with the Aeneid should be viewed as a single process that gradually adopts increasingly complex literary strategies. It does this through a series of four different forms of literary engagement with the Aeneid: translation, continuation, rejection and reconciliation. The increasing sophistication of these forms reflects the writers' desire to interact with the original Aeneid as political epic and Roman foundation narrative, and with the political, religious and literary contexts of early modern France. The first chapter compares the methods of and motivations behind all of the sixteenth-century translations of the Aeneid into French; it thus demonstrates shifts in successive translators' interpretations of Virgil's work, and of its application to sixteenth-century France. The next three chapters each analyse adaptation of Virgil's poem in a major French literary work. Firstly, Ronsard's Franciade is analysed as an example of French foundation epic that simultaneously draws upon and rejects Virgil's narrative. Ronsard's poem is read in the light of Mapheo Vegio's “Thirteenth Book” of the Aeneid, or Supplementum, which continues Virgil's narrative and carries it over into a Christian context. Next, Agrippa d'Aubigné's response to Virgilian epic in Les Tragiques is shown to have been mediated by Lucan's Pharsalia and its anti- epic and anti-imperialist interpretation of the Aeneid. D'Aubigné's inversion of Virgil is highlighted through comparison of attitudes to death and resurrection in Les Tragiques, the Aeneid and Vegio's Antoniad. Finally, Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas' combination, in La Sepmaine and La Seconde Sepmaine of the hexameral structure of Genesis with Virgil's narrative of reconciliation after civil war is shown to represent the most sophisticated understanding of and most complex interaction with the Aeneid in sixteenth-century France.

Working at the intersection of narrative studies and political theory, this thesis performs an original critical intervention in Gulliver’s Travels studies to establish the work as an intertextual response to the hegemonic articulations of European travel writing produced between the 15th and 18th centuries under the discourse of Discovery. My argument proceeds through two movements. First, an archeology of studies on Gulliver’s Travels that identifies key developments and points of significance in analyses of the satire’s intertextual relationship with travel writing. Second, a discursive analysis of the role of Discovery generally, and travel writing specifically, in constructing European hegemony within a newly global context. Together these movements allow me to locate Gulliver’s Travels firmly within the discourse of Discovery and to specify the politics of the text and the poetics of its operations. For this analysis I adopt a conceptualization of hegemony elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which defines discourse as a structured totality of elements of signification, wherein the meaning and identify of each element is constituted by articulatory practices competing to fix the differences and equivalences between it and others within the discourse. An hegemonic discourse is one that successfully limits the possibility of novel articulations according to a particular governing logic. In the Age of Discovery, this governing logic, I argue, is a socio-spatial logic that constructed the “European” subject through its difference from the “Non-European,” the “civilized” subject through its difference from the “savage,” and the “free land” of the “savage” peoples through its difference from the occupied lands of the “civilized.” To conduct the concomitant critical analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, I draw upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of the “distribution of the sensible,” which refers both to the partitions determined in sensory experience that anticipate the distributions of parts and wholes, the orders of visibility and invisibility, and the relationships of address or comportment beneath every community; and to the specific practices that partake of these distributions to establish the “common sense” about the objects that make up the common world, the ways in which it is organized, and the capacities of the people within it. This enables me to establish travel writing as an articulatory practice that utilized a narrative modality to “reveal” the globe in a Eurocentric image dependent upon the logic of Discovery: a discursively constructed paradigm that I identify as what others have labeled “travel realism,” which organized the globe into a single field of discursivity predicated upon the “civilizational” and “rational” superiority of Europeans over their non-European Others. Gulliver’s Travels, I conclude, intervenes in this distribution of the sensible by utilizing the satirical form as a recomposing logic to upend the paradigm of travel realism and break away from the “sense” that it makes of the bodies, beings, and lands it re-presents. / Graduate

Text in Afrikaans / ’n Merkbare opbloei in die publikasie van literêre niefiksietekste wêreldwyd het gelei tot die klassifikasie van sodanige tekste as ’n vierde genre. Die politieke oorgang in Suid-Afrika in 1994 het gelei tot ’n soortgelyke toename in outobiografiese tekste waarin kommentaar gelewer word op die Suid-Afrikaanse politieke werklikheid deur die vertel van sowel persoonlike as kollektiewe geskiedenisse. Daymond en Visagie (2012) identifiseer outo-etnografie, apologie en belydenis as kenmerke van die Suid-Afrikaanse outobiografie ná 1994. In hierdie navorsingsverslag word enkele resente skrywersoutobiografieë van onderskeidelik Elsa Joubert (’n Wonderlike geweld: jeugherinneringe (2005); Reisiger (2009)), André P. Brink (’n Vurk in die pad (2009)) en Koos Kombuis (Seks & drugs & boeremusiek: die memoirs van ‘n volksverraaier (2000); Die tyd van die Kombi’s: ‘n persoonlike blik op die Afrikaanse rock-rebellie (2009)) gemeet aan die kriteria wat deur Daymond en Visagie voorgestel word. Die beskrywing en interpretasie van verskeie outo-etnografiese merkers lei daartoe dat hierdie outobiografieë as ’n vorm van kulturele introspeksie beskou kan word. / A marked proliferation in the publication of literary nonfiction globally led to the classification of such texts as a fourth genre. The political transition in South Africa in 1994 caused a similar increase in autobiographical texts in which commentary is offered on the South African political reality through the telling of both personal and collective histories. Daymond and Visagie (2012) identify autoethnography, apologia and confession as characteristics of post-1994 South African autobiographies. In this research report some contemporary writers’ autobiographies, respectively those of Elsa Joubert (’n Wonderlike geweld: jeugherinneringe (2005); Reisiger (2009)), André P. Brink (’n Vurkin die pad (2009)) and Koos Kombuis (Seks & drugs & boeremusiek: die memoirs van ‘n volksverraaier (2000); Die tyd van die Kombi’s: ‘n persoonlike blik op die Afrikaanse rock-rebellie (2009)) are evaluated using the criteria proposed by Daymond and Visagie. The description and interpretation of various autoethnographical markers confirm that these autobiographies can be considered a form of cultural introspection. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Afrikaans)