This thesis presents a detailed study of the seventeenth century diplomat Sir Anthony Sherley's Relation of his Travels into Persia (1613). Sherley and his younger brother Robert travelled to Persia with a sizeable company of experienced English military officers who had originally been detailed to bolster the defences of Ferrara against an expected invasion by the Papal States in late 1597. Sherley remained in Persia for six months, which coincided with the Shah's return from a military expedition that had effectively secured his eastern frontiers against invasion, and as he embarked on preparations for a war of reconquest against the Ottomans, which was seized on by Sherley and his brothers to produce a stream of books, assuming credit for the later outbreak of war between the Muslim powers. Anthony and Robert Sherley were celebrated for inciting the Persians to war against the Turks, and their reputation was cemented with the publication of John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins' play entitled Travails of the Three English Brothers (1607). Day, Rowley and Wilkins' Travails, as well as the brothers' persistent self-promotion through the medium of popular print, has led to the erroneous notion that they were responsible for the establishment of Anglo-Persian diplomatic relations. This thesis provides an account of Sir Anthony Sherley's experiences prior to his journey to Persia, traces his shifting objectives as reflected in the clusters of texts published by and about the Sherley brothers, argues that his account was partly presented as an allegorical romance, and highlights the Machiavellian and Tacitean influences behind the Relation.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Maxine L. Montgomery, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 2, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2006. / Thesis directed by Glenn Hendler for the Department of English. "December 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-182).

“Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora” examines counter-discursive postcolonial rewritings. In my first chapter, “Re-Writing the Canon,” I examine two works that rewrite canonical texts from the European tradition, Jean Rhys’s retelling of the life of Jane Eyre’s Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea and Maryse Condé’s relocation of Wuthering Heights to the Caribbean in La migration des coeurs. In this chapter, I contend that re-writing functions not only as a response, as a “writing back” to the canon, but as a creative appropriation of and critical engagement with the canonical text and its worldview. My second chapter, “Re-Storying the Past,” examines fictional works that rewrite events from the historical past. The works that I study in this chapter are Assia Djebar’s recuperation of Algerian women’s resistance to French colonization in L’amour, la fantasia and Edwidge Danticat’s efforts to reconstruct the 1937 massacre of Haitians under Trujillo in The Farming of Bones. In my third chapter, “Re-Voicing Slavery,” I take for my subject neo-slave narratives that build on and revise the slave narrative genre of the late eighteenth- through early twentieth- centuries. The two works that I examine in this chapter are Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose and the poem sequence Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, based on the 1781 murder of Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. My fourth chapter, “Re-Membering Gender,” examines texts that foreground the processes of re-writing and re-telling, both thematically and structurally, so as to draw attention to the ways in which discourses and identities are constructed. In their attempts to counter masculinist discourses, these works seek to re-inscribe gender into these discourses, a process of re-membering that engenders a radical deconstruction of fixed notions of identity. The works that I read in this chapter include Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé soleil, which privileges the feminine and the multiple in opposition to patriarchal notions of single origins and authoritative narrative voices and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove, which rewrites Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique so as to critique the exclusive nature of Caribbean identity in his notion of créolité. / text