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.

Susanna Alakoski (född 1962) är en sverigefinsk författare, vars tredje bok heter Oktober i Fattigsverige. Dagbok som publicerades 2012 i Sverige. När boken året efter översattes till finska, fick den namnet Köyhän lokakuu – Päiväkirja. I min uppsats undersöker jag receptionen av Köyhän lokakuu – Päiväkirja i finska dagstidningar och litterära bloggar med hänsyn till Alakoskis bakgrund och bokens tema samt om receptionen varierar mellan professionella kritiker och amatörkritiker. I analysen utgår jag från receptionsteorin som introducerades av Hans Robert Jauss. Vidare utgår jag från litteraturkritikens tre komponenter som Markku Huotari sammanfattar till den skönlitterära textens beskrivning, tolkning och värdering. Argumenteringens grundvalar ethos, pathos och logos stödjer analysen. Materialet består av sju dagstidningsrecensioner och tio bloggrecensioner, och tidsmässigt omfattar materialet tiden från slutet av 2013 till juni 2014. Antalet i undersökningen använda tidnings- recensioner blir totalt fyra eftersom en och samma recension används totalt av fyra tidningar. Resultatet visar att både tidnings- och bloggrecensenter fokuserar mest i fattigdomstemat i Köyhän lokakuu – Päiväkirja. Dagboksformen och berättelsen om författarens egna barndomserfarenheter betraktas som trovärdiga. Emellertid diskuterar två bloggrecensenter skillnader mellan fakta och fiktion samt om Alakoski trots allt kombinerar fakta med fiktion för att nå ut med sitt politiska budskap: välfärdssamhällets okunskap om fattigdom. Amatörrecensenterna visar större variation och högre grad av personliga synpunkter i sina recensioner än de professionella skribenterna. Amatörrecensenter använder också mer av intertextuella jämförelser utanför Alakoskis produktion såsom feminism och arbetarlitteratur. Bloggskribenterna rekommenderar boken i större omfattning än tidningsrecensenterna men anger att läsaren behöver vara intresserad av ämnet eftersom bokens form och skrivsätt gör läsningen besvärlig. Det framgår från mottagningen av Köyhän lokakuu – Päiväkirja att läsupplevelsen inte motsvarar förväntningarna som är baserade på Alakoskis debutbok Svinalängorna från 2006, utgiven på finska 2007 med namnet Sikalat. Svinalängorna är en flerfaldigt prisbelönt bok i Sverige och har samma tema som Köyhän lokakuu – Päiväkirja, men bokens romanform ger en annorlunda läsupplevelse.

My dissertation analyzes the portrayal of women in Jewish novels of the Greco-Roman period (300 BCE-100CE): Greek Esther, Judith, Susanna, and Aseneth. During the Greco-Roman period, the female heroine frequently became the focus in Jewish novels. This innovation coincides with a concern over maintaining Jewishness. Several areas surrounding the maintenance of social identity appear in the Jewish novels, including dietary restrictions and the preservation of the family. Although a great deal of literature exists regarding the above texts, there are currently no systematic examinations of the portrayal of women’s Jewishness in regards to the Jewish novels. My dissertation examines the portrayal of women in the Jewish novels through a literary critical approach and questions how their representation can inform scholarship on how authors depicted Jewishness during this period. This dissertation treats the Jewish novels collectively and contributes to the scholarly discussion with a systematic examination of depictions of Jewish women in these texts. Following a brief introduction in Chapter 1, where I provide an overview and assessment of earlier treatments on the Jewish novels and the topics of women and Jewishness, Chapters 2 through 5 examine the portrayal of women in the Jewish novels. These chapters are organized around four distinct aspects of Jewishness which center on the representation of the female protagonists and their relationships in the narratives: 1) the representation of women’s sexuality, 2) the preservation of foodways, 3) kinship ties, and 4) the role of the protagonist in their Jewish community. In Chapter 6, I use a comparative approach to examine the depiction of women’s Jewishness in the novels, which demonstrates women’s active roles in maintaining and defining Jewishness. Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation with a summary and recommendations for future work. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation analyzes the portrayal of women in Jewish novels of the Greco-Roman period (300 BCE-100CE): Greek Esther, Judith, Susanna, and Aseneth. I question how women’s representation in the Jewish novels can inform scholarship on how authors depicted Jewishness during this period. The analysis of women is organized around four categories of Jewishness centered on the representation of the female protagonists and their relationships in the narratives: 1) the representation of women’s sexuality, 2) the preservation of foodways, 3) kinship ties, and 4) the role of the protagonist in their broader Jewish community. This dissertation contributes to the scholarly discussion by providing a systematic examination of depictions of Jewish women found in these texts and demonstrates that the authors of the Jewish novels depict women playing active roles in maintaining and defining Jewishness.

No description available.

No description available.

During the 21st century, Society has again begun to focus its attention on working class literature and on issues related to social class. In the media contemporary working class literature is often mentioned as a distinct phenomenon. I my view, the meaning of this phenomenon have not been adequately formulated. The aim of this Master’s Thesis is to reconstruct, using a discourse oriented text analysis, a picture of how the contemporary working class literature is described in today’s society. This approach falls therefore within the framework of the Sociology of Literature and is based on the assumption that the discourse of working class literature is undergoing change. Utilizing an established definition of working class literature, I have created five nodal points around which I believe the discourse is mainly formed and changed. Links are then made to these points from chains of equivalence, based on essential ideas concerning the identities that have been ascribed to different subjects and objects. In order to show how the discourse is contextually constructed, the results are seen in relation to a discussion in contemporary research and literature about class society and the welfare state. My empirical data consists mainly of reviews and interviews in leading daily newspapers in Sweden concerning five writers who have published novels between 1999 and 2007 and who have been associated with contemporary working class literature. These writers are Lena Andersson, Torbjörn Flygt, Tony Samuelsson, Susanna Alakoski and Åsa Linderborg. The results show that the working class writer is a “class traveller”, who today holds a prominent position within the literary public sphere. The main purpose of the literature is to criticize the class society of today and to make it more visible. The novels reflects findings from social science research showing that the modern welfare state is a segregated and unequal society where the losers mainly consist of the unemployed and immigrants who often live in suburbs that were built during the million dwellings program. They also show today’s working class that primarily consist of people within the caring and service sectors and therefore largely are women. / Uppsatsnivå: D

Denna uppsats syfte är att analysera hur status förknippad med svenskan och finskan gestaltas i följande två romaner: Susanna Alakoskis Svinalängorna och Kjell Westös Vådan av att vara Skrake. Analysen görs utifrån språkväxling i de olika romanerna och genom en analys av de diskurser som konstrueras kring det finska respektive det svenska. Den valda metoden är en kritisk diskursanalys och i enlighet med denna metod tecknas också en övergripande bild av den historiska relationen mellan Sverige och Finland – den kontext utifrån vilken diskurserna formas. Utöver detta hämtas andra teoretiska begrepp, som attityder, ur sociolingvistiken. Uppsatsen tar avstamp i den tidigare forskning som finns om relationen mellan skönlitteratur och flerspråkighetsförhållanden, men särskiljer sig delvis från denna sett till metodval.Uppsatsens resultat visar att vissa värden tillskrivs, och att vissa diskurser formas kring, det finska och det svenska i romanerna, i och genom språkväxling, karaktärer, handlingar och beskrivningar. På olika sätt gestaltas, generellt sett, en högre status hos det som associeras med det svenska än det finska. Men diskurserna som konstrueras kan inte förstås som separata från övriga diskurser och aspekter – i Svinalängorna sammanblandas de med klass- och genusperspektiv och i Vådan av att vara Skrake kompliceras bilden av ett speciellt sorts berättande.

No description available.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p.53-56).

This dissertation asserts that women’s anonymity in seventeenth-century devotional texts functions as a performance to be understood rather than a mystery to be solved. Anonymity has long been framed as merely a protean form of authorship or a barrier to the recovery of a lost literary history. The archive frequently renders anonymity invisible or reveals anonymity at the moment of its undoing; however, this study of women’s anonymity contends that, although women applied anonymity to avoid the stigma of print, their anonymity functions less as a blind than as a frame to emphasize those traits they wished most to expose. In my first and second chapters, I demonstrate how the anonymous Eliza’s Babes (1652) and the nearly anonymous An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacion (1653) use the anonymous text to replace the signification of sick, infertile, and therefore volatile female bodies with an imitative production of devotion that constitutes the text as a divinely-restored, alternatively-productive body through which they relate to God and reader. Readers’ positive reception of this devotional re-signification of the body’s productivity countermands stereotypes readers hold against women writing, affirms the woman writer as faithful, and reincorporates both reader and writer in a corporate body of believers through their mutual participation in devotional practices. My third chapter affirms the perceived authority of anonymity’s corporate voice through the exploration of George Hickes’s retroactive attribution of several late seventeenth-century anonymous devotional texts to Susanna Hopton. I argue that the derivative nature of the anonymous devotional collections invests them with a corporate voice Hickes finds to be a valuable asset in his defense of Hopton’s devotional acumen. Drawing together scholarship on seventeenth-century relationality and intersubjectivity, readership, devotion, and women’s health, this study reconsiders the signification of women’s anonymity and their unoriginality as a tool that facilitates agentive reading and rehabilitates women’s claim to corporate belonging. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)