In a comparison of two novels, Ways of Dying (1995) and Black Diamond (2009), this dissertation examines Zakes Mda's ongoing use of fiction in presenting incisive social commentary in the post-apartheid literary context. Mda's debut novel is a complex magic realist tale of Toloki, the professional mourner, who journeys from the village to the urban township. It is markedly different from his post-millennial satire, which invokes the social realist form, constructing a rapidly unfolding plot of urban gangsters, crime and sex, in which the characters are more representational than well-developed. While Ways of Dying has been praised as Mda's thought-provoking novel of the transition, Black Diamond has sometimes been criticised as being less able to comment significantly on the state of post-millennial South Africa. Subsequently, this dissertation evaluates the potential of Mda's most recent fictional portrayal of post-apartheid society to provide a meaningful interpretation of and commentary on post-apartheid South Africa, alongside his earlier novel.

Different forms of racial segregation have been practiced in different countries the world over. However, the nature of South Africa‟s apartheid system, as it was practiced from 1948 until the dawn of the democratic dispensation in 1994, has been a subject of debate in South Africa and even beyond. Apartheid was a policy that was designed by the then ruling Nationalist Party for purposes of dividing and stratifying South Africa along racial lines - whites, blacks, coloureds and Asians. It thus promoted racial segregation and/or unequal stratification of society. In South Africa‟s hierarchy of apartheid, blacks, who constituted the majority of the population, were ironically the most destitute and segregated. Some historians believe that South Africa‟s racial policy was designed against the backdrop of Jim Crow, a similar system of racial discrimination which was instituted in the American South late in the 1890s through the 20th century. Jim Crow and apartheid are, in this study, considered as sides of the same coin; hence for the sake of convenience, the word apartheid is used to subsume Jim Crow. Although South Africa‟s apartheid system was influenced by different ideologies, for example German missiology as applied by the Dutch Reformed Church, historian Hermann Giliomee (2003: 373) insists that „the segregationist practice of the American South was particularly influential.‟ Given the ideological relationship between apartheid and Jim Crow, the present study investigates the interplay of compatibility between apartheid/Jim Crow and crime and violence as reflected in selected works of Richard Wright (African American novelist) and Athol Fugard (South African playwright). The aim of the study is firstly, to examine the works in order to analyse them as responses to apartheid and by extension colonial domination and secondly to investigate crime and violence. The three criminological theories selected for this study are strain theory (by Robert Merton), subculture theory (Edwin Sutherland) and labelling theory (Howard Becker). While criminological theory provides an empirical dimension to the study, postcolonial theory situates the study within a specified space, which is the postcolonial context. The postcolonial is, however understood, not as a demarcated historical space, but as a continuum, from the dawn of colonization to the unforeseeable future. Three postcolonial theorists have been identified for the purposes of this study. These are: Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha and Bill Ashcroft. Fanon‟s psychoanalysis of the colonized, Homi Bhabha‟s Third Space and hybridity as well as Ashcroft‟s postcolonial transformation are key concepts in understanding the different ways in which the colonized deal with the consequences of colonization. It has been suggested particularly in Edward Said‟s Orientalism (1978) that the discourse of orientalism creates the Oriental, as if Orientals were a passive object of the colonial adventure. This study uses Bhabha‟s and Ashcroft‟s theory of colonial discourse to argue that the colonized are not only objects of the colonial enterprise but also active participants in the process of opening survival spaces for self-realization. The various criminal activities that the colonized engage in (as represented in the selected works of Richard Wright and Athol Fugard) are in this study viewed as ways of inscribing their subjectivity within an exclusive colonial system.

Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871) is a writer whose work enjoyed immense popularity in his lifetime. Today, however, he is largely forgotten or ignored. This thesis proposes the rehabilitation of Nickler in German literary history. His work, consisting mainly of travelogues, achieves a stylistic distinction comparable to that of Heinrich Heine, and depicts events, places and people with a political and social perception that shows him to have been far ahead of his time. Nickler has always been a controversial figure. Though seen by some of his contemporaries as one of Germany's most influential and eloquent liberal travelogue-writers, he was also denounced as a second-rate poet who pandered to the aristocracy. As far as it exists, modern Nickler scholarship grants his work its deserved position in the genre of travel literature, but does not fully recognize its importance as politically and socially committed writing. For most of his life Pückler was interested in social and political questions. During his travels in Great Britain (1826-1828), documented in the Briefe eines Verstorbenen, he was introduced to the English political system. Henceforth, he proclaimed the need for a German constitutional monarchy. While travelling in Ireland he witnessed the struggle of the Irish people and became a strong supporter of the Irish emancipation movement. In Germany, he came in close contact with the group of writers known as "Junges Deutschland." Their writings were outlawed by the authorities in 1835, because of their treatment of political issues ranging from freedom of the press, autonomy of the universities, and constitutional questions, to the need for greater social justice. When he raised these issues in Tutti Frutti (1834), Nickler narrowly escaped a ban on the publication of his works, for some reactionary circles considered him a liberal agitator. Indeed, both Nickler's early pieces and his later work, such as the travel narrative Süd Ostlicher Bildersaal(1840), depicting the Wittelsbacher reign in Greece and the author’s association with the autocratic King of the Greeks, Otto I, demonstrate liberal conviction and progressive political thinking. This thesis examines critically Nickler's writings about England, Ireland, Germany und Greece, traces the author’s attitudes towards historical circumstances and personages and argues for the importance of his work and for its location close to that of other "Young German" writers, such as Heine, Borne or Herwegh. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

William Wordsworth was not the civic-minded public servant who is often thought of when good citizenship awards are given. However, it can be said that through his writings, he did much to arouse others to an awareness of political, religious, and educational needs of his country. This thesis examines his views in these areas and how they contributed to him as a citizen.

This thesis considers Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) in relation to Jacques Rancière’s thinking of the politics of literature. It examines the novel’s different spatial configurations and the relationships it establishes between private and public spaces, home and city, inner and outer. The thesis puts particular emphasis on the novel’s many windows in order to show how they mediate these relationships between different spaces and rooms and how these relationships in turn relate to the political through what the windows present and make visible to the observer and in what way. It also shows how different kinds of spaces in the novel continually open up to their outside. In addition to Rancière’s thinking of the politics of literature in general this thesis also draws on his readings of Woolf in order to establish a dialogue between the two. The thesis reconsiders the prevalent view of the political aspect of the novel and shows how the novel’s politics lies not solely in its tracing of changes in society or its representation of the relationship between private and public spaces, but also in the way it configures sensible experience and its inherent possibilities.

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Stripped of the intent of its author, L. Frank Baum, the children's fairy tale The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was left to be understood only within a changing cultural construct. Historian Hayden White, arguing that the similarities between a novel and a work of history were more significant than their differences, insisted that history was preeminently a subsection of literature. According to White, historical narratives were manifestly verbal fictions, and the only acceptable grounds upon which the historian should choose his historical perspective were the moral and the aesthetic. White conflated historical consciousness with myth and blurred the boundary that had long divided history from fiction. Just as changing cultural concerns infused the Dorothy of Baum's children's literature with meaning so social, cultural, and moral imperatives came to dictate the content of historical stories particularly in the historiography of the Reconstruction era. The twenty first century conception of Reconstruction is different from the conception influential at the start of the twentieth. In assessing the scholarship of William A. Dunning, contemporary historians have adopted a new paradigm when describing the scholar's Reconstruction accounts. Modern commentators reject Dunning's authorial intention and the contextual framework needed to define it. Thus, Dunning has receded into the "realm of myth." Careful attendance to Dunning's historical context, contemporary audience, and his authorial intent, will reposition the perspective for analysis of Dunning's work. Removing Dunning from abstract analysis will allow historians to arrive at an understanding of his work, and view the importance of the real Dunning, rather than the fabricated image constructed from a partial and even fragmented reading of his work. / Taking Dunning on his own terms restores a meaningful past and brings into bas-relief the tremendous advances the U. S. of twenty first century has made in reshaping social and political patterns.Taking theReconstruction era on its own terms impels historians to move beyond Dunning and return in their research to revisit primary records and documents as they work to clear the grisly ground of Reconstruction historiography for further fruitful examination. / by Kathleen P. Barsalou. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2008 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

張詠梅. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2001. / 參考文獻 (p. 235-273). / 中英文摘要. / Available also through the Internet via Dissertations & theses @ Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Zhang Yongmei. / Lun wen (Zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2001. / Can kao wen xian (p. 235-273). / Zhong Ying wen zhai yao.

黎必信. / "2012年3月". / "2012 nian 3 yue". / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 355-368). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Li Bixin.