Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns portrays the harrowing narrative of two women living in oppressive circumstances enforced to them by society and by their husband. In their suffering, the two manage to find strength in each other. Hosseini depicts a complex society in which many factors contribute to the suffering the main characters experience, many of which could be described as New Orientalist. This thesis will analyse the way education is portrayed in the novel and how Hosseini offers us a nuanced presentation that counters the New Orientalist themes present in the novel. We will start by analysing the main characters’ personal attitudes towards education and the parental influences in their lives. Then we will continue to analyse the way society is portrayed to affect potential educational options through other characters. Last, we will focus on the political climate in the novel, in particularly the Soviet Union and the Taliban, and how they affected the development of the educational system present in A Thousand Splendid Suns.

This thesis is dealing with the development of the Great Britan foreign policy in the last two decades of the 19th century. The period of time covered her is marked by the era berween the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882 and the sign of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902. Primarily, the thesis concentrates on the Foreign Office working and the top-british politicians. The fundamental objective is assessment of the process of change British policy and the definitive rejection of Splendid Isolation in 1902. Therefore it will especially watch the rivalry of powers in peripheries in Africa, Balkans and the Far East. The thesis is devided into eight chapters. The final part resumes the data arising from the research of creation the foreign policy. Key Words: Foreign policy, Great Britain, foreign policy, Victorian era, splendid isolation, Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 19th century

No description available.

This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.