<p>Finnish-born writer Susanna Alakoski’s novel Svinalängorna became a big success after being published in Sweden in April 2006. Though the novel has many themes in common with earlier literature written by and about Finnish immigrants in Sweden, little attention has been brought to this fact by reviewers and journalists. This essay examines connections between Alakoski’s novel and Finnish migrant literature in Sweden, mainly from the 1970s, and how these connections have been recognised by reviewers in Sweden and Finland. Based on the examination made here, Svinalängorna can be said to have several significant themes and features in common with other Finnish immigrant literature written in Sweden. However, in the examined material, none of the Swedish reviewers and only two of the Finnish reviewers referred to earlier literature written by and/or about Finns in Sweden. The main reference point for the Swedish reviewers was traditional Swedish working-class literature while the Finnish reviewers mainly referred to newer Finnish literature exploring similar themes: alcoholism, poverty and childhood. In general, the Finnish reviewers found the novel more familiar than the Swedish reviewers.</p>

Finnish-born writer Susanna Alakoski’s novel Svinalängorna became a big success after being published in Sweden in April 2006. Though the novel has many themes in common with earlier literature written by and about Finnish immigrants in Sweden, little attention has been brought to this fact by reviewers and journalists. This essay examines connections between Alakoski’s novel and Finnish migrant literature in Sweden, mainly from the 1970s, and how these connections have been recognised by reviewers in Sweden and Finland. Based on the examination made here, Svinalängorna can be said to have several significant themes and features in common with other Finnish immigrant literature written in Sweden. However, in the examined material, none of the Swedish reviewers and only two of the Finnish reviewers referred to earlier literature written by and/or about Finns in Sweden. The main reference point for the Swedish reviewers was traditional Swedish working-class literature while the Finnish reviewers mainly referred to newer Finnish literature exploring similar themes: alcoholism, poverty and childhood. In general, the Finnish reviewers found the novel more familiar than the Swedish reviewers.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elder’s trilogy consisting of her 1610, 1622 and 1649 paintings is a self referential series based on the artist’s own feelings of betrayal by the men in her life. These works are comprised of her first canvas showing youthful fear, and a very importantly timed work in mid-career symbolizing commercial success. In these, she relates the Apocryphal tale of Susanna and the Elders to events that are happening to Gentileschi at each stage of her life and career, aging the figures of Susanna and the Elders along with the appropriate time in her own life. In the final canvas of the trilogy, Gentileschi brings the work to full circle, using the story to make peace with her past by visualizing a reconciliation with her father Orazio, from whom she had been estranged from her most of her career, both as parent and as artistic mentor.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2000. / Adviser: Carol Flynn. Submitted to the Dept. of English Literature. Includes bibliographical references. Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2002. / Adviser: Barbara W. Grossman. Submitted to the Dept. of Drama. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-318). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (M.A.)--Washington State University, May 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-67).

In 1982, Richard C. Frushell urged the necessity for a critical study of Susanna Centlivre's plays. Since then, only a handful of books and articles briefly discuss herand many attempt wrongly to force her into various critical models. Drawing on performativity models, my reading of several Centlivre plays (Love's Contrivance, The Gamester, The Basset-Table and A Bold Stroke for a Wife) asks the question, "What was it like to see these plays in performance?" Occupying somewhat uneasy ground between literature and theatre studies, I borrow useful tools from both, to create what might be styled a New Historicist Dramaturgy. I urge a re-examination of the period 1708-28. The standard reading of theatre of the period is that it was static. This "dry spell" of English theatre, most critics agree, was filled with stock characters and predictable plot lines. But it is during this so-called "dry spell" that Centlivre refines her stagecraft, and convinces cautious managers to bank on her work, providing evidence that playwrights of the period were subtly experimenting. The previous trend in scholarship of this cautious and paranoid era of theatre history has been to shy away from examining the plays in any depth, and fall back on pigeonholing them. But why were the playwrights turning out the work that they did? What is truly representative of the period? Continued examination may stop us from calling the period a "dry spell." For that purpose, examining some of Centlivre's early work encourages us to avoid the tendency to study only a few playwrights of the period, and to avoid the trap of focusing on biography rather than text. I propose a different kind of aesthetic, stemming from my interest in the text as precursor to performance. Some of these works may not seem fertile ground for theorists, but discarding them on that basis fails to take into account their original purpose: to entertain.

The narrators of Roughing It in the Bush and Obasan struggle with the notion of home and how to reinvent it in situations of exile. Moodie is estranged when she emmigrates from Britain to Canada to find her role compromised by the rigors of the pioneering experience. Naomi, a Japanese Canadian is estranged when she and her family are expelled from their home, relocated in internment camps, and dispersed across the country during the Second World War. I argue that reinventing home requires both questioning and claiming material and discursive spaces. / Moodie reinvents home by negotiating Old and New World spaces of gender, class and culture. Naomi reinvents home by questioning official, exclusionary discourse and testifying to the Japanese Canadian history of internment and dispersal. Both narrators negotiate borders between private experience and public discourse and in the process, explore the question: "What is the meaning of home?"

This thesis addresses four Canadian immigrant English-language prose writers in order to identify commonalities and differences in their literary representations of the immigrant experience over time. While origin and ethnicity factored in the selection of writers so as to ensure diversity, the primary selection criterion was to obtain a significant historical range, from the 1830s to the present. The writers selected are: Susanna Moodie, an immigrant from England in the mid-19th century; John Marlyn, an immigrant from Hungary in the early-20th century; Michael Ondaatje, an immigrant from Sri Lanka via England in the mid-20th century; and Rawi Hage, an immigrant from Lebanon via the US in the late-20th century. I conclude that there are significant similarities among the works of all four writers, generally attributable to their shared experience of being immigrants, and equally significant areas of divergence, generally attributable to the development of Canada, with Moodie and Marlyn on one side of an important watershed in the mid-1950s, and Ondaatje and Hage on the other. All four write extensively of the experience of the immigrant with a fundamental similarity in their depiction of isolation, non-belonging and dislocation. Over time, the representations of isolation have become more complex, mirroring the increasing diversity and complexity of Canadian society. The mid-1950s shift in Canadian immigration policy from preferred British, US, and Northern European immigration to multinational immigration has resulted in increased diversity of both the Canadian immigrant population and Canadian literature. While the environment of the immigrant to Canada changes, one constant has been and is likely to continue to be a sense of dislocation, non-belonging and isolation, of being an uninvited outsider, or survenant. Canadian literature has reflected this reality consistently for almost 200 years and will no doubt continue to do so.

Authors Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Graz, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [291]-310) and index.