As a relatively "new" genre, the short story has received little attention compared to other forms like the novel. Some attempts to define the genre approach it comparatively and systematically---an effort to distinguish the short story from other forms, or to distinguish between different kinds of short fiction. This essay instead proposes a "cluster" of elements that tend to characterize the short story, as derived from the romantic, impressionist, realist, modern, and postmodern traditions. Edgar Allan Poe's notion of "unity of effect" provides a critical standpoint to discuss these features. Poe's concept of unity also partakes in the essay's discussion of the self and the text. Questions of the self are often present in the short story, and the fragmentation of identity often parallels the short story's formal and stylistic fragmentation. The stories in this collection present characters in varying states of crisis, as they negotiate the boundaries of the self, or otherwise question what the "self" means.

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Jean Rhys's primary concern in her fiction is the fragmentation of the self. Her Caribbean/postcolonial experience, her gender positioning and her encounter with modernism contribute to her experience of fragmentation. Lacanian theory provides a plausible framework to understand the idea of fragmentation in Rhys's fiction. Through the use of the mirror image across her longer fiction, Rhys presents her heroines' fragmented subjectivity. She further elaborates it through her heroines' engagement with language and its impact on their subject position. Rhys's engagement with the mirror image and the role of language in creating an individual's subject position aligns with the Lacanian theory of subject formation. In Rhys's vision death is the only possible resolution of the fundamental fragmentation of the self.

by Yu Cheuk Keung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-116). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Introduction Two Notions of (In)decision and Their Relevance to the Underlying Concepts of Subjectivity --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One --- The Formation of a Narcissistic Hero: Lord Jim --- p.24 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Sexual Impotence and Psychological Indecision: Half of Man is Woman --- p.46 / Chapter Chapter Three --- "From a Self of ""Being"" to a Self of ""Nothingness"": The French Lieutenant 's Woman" --- p.73 / Conclusion Toward a Better Understanding of the Psyche --- p.99 / Notes --- p.107 / Works Cited --- p.108 / Bibliography --- p.110

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Simon Fraser University, 2007. / Theses (Faculty of Education) / Simon Fraser University. Senior supervisor: Stephen Smith -- Faculty of Education. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

The dissertation argues that libertine first-person lyrics of seventeenth-century England reveal a coherent literary strategy in formal, thematic, and ideological terms. My focus is the libertine poems of Donne, Suckling, Carew, Lovelace, and Rochester. I situate the lyrics in a period of historical change, an age of epistemological and ontological questioning. Libertine lyrics concern inconstancy on various levels, from the sexual to the ontological, and they explore the problems of freedom, human nature, identity, and individualism. I argue that the libertine's inconstant selfhood is a creative "solution" to a historical dilemma. This conception of inconstant selfhood is also a response to courtly prescriptions of the behavior of poets and courtiers, a way of claiming an authoritative voice and individualistic freedom. My examination of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics shows that, as part of a transitional age, the poems manifest a contradictory character and they reveal an ideological inconsistency. However, in the final analysis, the imaginative answer to the period's problem of mutability and displacement that libertine lyrics offer turns out to be unsatisfactory. In tracing the development of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics, I suggest that the poems constitute an experimental and transitional development in the lyric tradition of male confessional desire.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1959. / Typescript. Abstracted in Dissertation abstracts, v. 19 (1959) no. 7, p. 1762. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-236).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2000. / "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in comparative literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Religion, and Film/Media Studies." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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