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As the oldest genre in New Zealand literature written in English, poetry always played a significant role in the country's literary debate and was generally considered to be an indicator of the country's cultural advancement. Throughout the 20th century, the question of home, of where it is and what it entails, became a crucial issue in discussing a distinct New Zealand sense of identity and in strengthening its independent cultural status. The establishment of a national sense of home was thus of primary concern, and poetry was regarded as the cultural marker of New Zealand's independence as a nation. In this politically motivated cultural debate, the writing of women was only considered on the margin, largely because their writing was considered too personal and too intimately tied together with daily life, especially domestic life, as to be able to contribute to a larger cultural statement. Such criticism built on gender role stereotypes, like for instance women's roles as mothers and housewives in the 1950s. The strong alignment of women with the home environment is not coincidental but a construct that was, and still is, predominantly shaped by white patriarchal ideology. However, it is in particular women's, both Pakeha and Maori, thorough investigation into the concept of home from within New Zealand's society that bears the potential for revealing a more profound relationship between actual social reality and the poetic imagination. The close reading of selected poems by Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, Lauris Edmond and J.C. Sturm in this thesis reveals the ways in which New Zealand women of different backgrounds subvert, transcend and deconstruct such paradigms through their poetic imagination. Bethell, Stanley, Edmond and Sturm position their concepts of home at the crossroads between the public and the private realm. Their poems explore the correspondence between personal and national concerns and assess daily life against the backdrop of New Zealand's social development. Such complex socio-cultural interdependence has not been paid sufficient attention to in literary criticism, largely because a suitable approach to capturing the complexity of this kind of interconnectedness was lacking. With Spaces of Overlap and Spaces of Mediation this thesis presents two critical models that seek to break the tight critical frames in the assessment of poetic concepts of home. Both notions are based on a contextualised approach to the poetic imagination in relation to social reality and seek to carve out the concept of home in its interconnected patterns. Eventually, this approach helps to comprehend the ways in which women's intimate negotiations of home translate into moments of cultural insight and transcend the boundaries of the individual poets' concerns. The focus on women's (re)negotiations of home counteracts the traditionally male perspective on New Zealand poetry and provides a more comprehensive picture of New Zealand's cultural fabric. In highlighting the works of Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, Lauris Edmond and J.C. Sturm, this thesis not only emphasises their individual achievements but makes clear that a traditional line of New Zealand women's poetry exists that has been neglected far too long in the estimation of New Zealand's literary history.
Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt sich die Übertragung und Anwendung des pragma-semantischen Ansatzes der germanistischen Phraseologie auf die englische Sprache zum Ziel, wobei die beiden Konzepte des semantischen Mehrwerts und der Multifunktionalität als dominante Charakteristika im Mittelpunkt stehen. Dazu wird die Verwendung von Phraseologismen in einer bestimmten Textsorte - der englischsprachigen Werbung - untersucht. Ihre besondere Bedeutungsstruktur und ihre kommunikativen Funktionen prädestinieren Phraseologismen als effektvolles sprachliches Gestaltungsmittel für die kreative Verwendung in Texten der Medienwelt. Werbung als wesentlicher Bestandteil nationaler Alltags- und Medienkultur und Phraseologismen als in ihrer Ausprägung spezifisch kulturelle Phänomene weisen viele Gemeinsamkeiten auf, die sich bei beiden in Form von semantischem Mehrwert und Multifunktionalität äußern.
My dissertation is concerned with contemporary (Anglo-)Canadian immigrant fiction and proposes an analytic grid with which it may be appreciated and compared more adequately. As a starting-point serves the general observation that the works of many Canadian immigrant writers are characterised by a focus on their respective home cultures as well as on their Canadian host culture. Following the ground-breaking work of Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood and David Staines, the categories of "there" and "here" are suggested in order to reflect this double encoding of Canadian immigrant literature. However, "here" and "there" are more than spatial configurations in that they represent a concern with issues of multiculturalism and postcolonialism. Both of which are informed by an emphasis on difference and identity, and difference and identity are also what the narratives of M.G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath and Rohinton Mistry are preoccupied with. My study sets out to show two things: On the one hand, it attempts to exemplify the complexity and interrelatedness of "there" and "here" in a representative fashion. Hence in their treatments of difference, M.G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath and Rohinton Mistry come up with comparable identity constructions "here" and "there" respectively. On the other hand, special attention is paid to the strategies by which Vassanji, Bissoondath and Mistry construct difference and corroborate their respective understandings of identity.
Since the end of the British Empire, which had provided white Australians with points of view, attitudes and stereotypes of the world - including perceptions of their own role in it -, rediscovering an international identity has been an Australian quest. Many turned to European roots; others to the Aboriginal landscape; Blanche d"Alpuget and Christopher J. Koch are two who have ventured into Asia for the culturally and spiritually regenerative materials necessary to redefine Australia in the post-colonial world. They have taken Eastern concepts of "self", and "soul" and forged them with the Australian obsession of fear and desire of contact with the "other" in a looking-glass of hybrid, Austral-Asian myth to reveal the true soul of Australian identity. Along with a brief historical and literary background to the triangular relationship between white Australia, Asia, and the West, this study- goal is to identify some of the Southeast Asian symbols, myths and literary structures which Koch and d"Alpuget integrate into the Western tradition. Central elements include: dichotomies as of personality, righteousness, and virtue; the "Otherworld", where one may approach enlightenment, but at the risk of falling into self-delusion; archetypes of the Hindu divine feminine; Eastern roots of Koch- themes of the "double man"; concepts of the forces of "light" and "dark"; the semiotics of time and meaning; and the central Eastern metaphor of the mirror by which Australia creates interdependent images of itself and of Asia.
This doctoral dissertation examines two authors of German descent who are representatives for the development of Canadian literature and its regional focus on the prairies: Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) and Robert Kroetsch (*1927). Kroetsch, in his essays and talks, has repeatedly referred to Grove as one of his "literary ancestors". Although there exist monographs and numerous articles on both authors, the present study is the first-ever comparative approach. This study's main access is provided by the motif of disguise and masquerade, which plays a central role in the authors' works. Even if critics have looked at the traditional motif (cf. Homer's Odyssey, or many Renaissance plays) in Kroetsch's writing sporadically, and have used it to examine Grove's biography, no approach has attempted a larger contextualization within/among both writers' oeuvres. According to Lloyd Davis, however, the motif can be seen as "representing the cultural dialogism, rather than any particular thesis, of selfhood" (Davis 16). Hence, it helps interrogate a topic that within Canada - the former colony and current multicultural immigrant society - had and has a specific relevance. As an analytical tool, the motif allows for highlighting both the similarities and the differences between the œuvres of Grove and Kroetsch as key-figures of a (post)colonial literature of Western Canada on the one hand, and for general questions pertaining to the characterisation of figures, the definition of narrative positions and even of genres on the other hand. Following the preface, two theoretical chapters outline conceptions of identity and their deducible forms and functions of disguise and masquerade, including a discussion of John Richardson's Wacousta (1832), which is the first Canadian example for the motif's constitutive use. The second major section sketches, in two separate chapters, the poetics and mentalities (Mentalitätsgeschichte) of each writer within the context of their complete works by looking at biographical data as well as the critics' assessments. After immigrating into Manitoba in 1912, Grove soon became the first representative of a literary prairie-realism. Before, he had faked his suicide in 1909 and stripped off his 'original' identity as the German translator (e.g., Wilde, Wells, Flaubert) as well as modestly successful poet and novelist Felix Paul Greve to leave behind debts and a notorious lover and to reinvent himself in the New World. The protean role-plays of 'FPG' - decoded only 23 years after his death - are manifested in his creation of literary characters, in a "collectivity of identities" (Cavell 12) or number of metonymic personae that keep his critics busy to this date. Providing a different story, Kroetsch's family of German background immigrated into Canada in the mid-19th-century. Kroetsch has been thematizing his native province, Alberta, just as much as general national dispositions or questings in the course of his literary career spanning five decades now. His progressive and experimental writing has earned him, for instance, the label of "Mr Canadian Postmodern" by Linda Hutcheon (Canadian Postmodern 183). Particularly important among his specifically postmodern instruments is the principle of archaeology as derived from Foucault and employed as both metaphor and method; further methodological tools are Barthes' theories on reading/writing as an erotic act, Bakhtin's notion of (the) carnival(ization of literature) and a great sensibility for the myths as well as oral traditions of the North American Natives. If the third section analyzes two of FPG's novels to illustrate his transfer, or literal translation, from a German to a Canadian cultural context, the fourth section represents this study's core with three one-to-one comparisons of the two writers' central prose texts. In spite of all affinities between both authors, however, this section already indicates what section five further underlines: Kroetsch clearly transcends Grove's achievements (which ultimately reduce all his characters and texts to nothing but his own will- and wishful projections and identity-configurations); on the level of narrativity, genre and gender, Kroetsch not only goes far beyond parodying Grove, but proves to be an innovator whose mis-en-scène of the motif of disguise provides both more psychological depth and relevance for socio-historical contexts. This comparative study has been informed by research in the Special Archives and Collections at the University of Manitoba (Grove Papers) and at the University of Calgary (Kroetsch Papers), by related talks at Lund, Belfast and Winnipeg as well as by an occasional quotation from an interview I conducted with Robert Kroetsch as early as 1996.
Mothers and Daughters: The Female English Bildungsroman, 1811-1915 This dissertation analyses the mother-daughter-relationship of five female apprenticeship novels. In the course of the study of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1865), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915) modern feminist, psychological, and psychoanalytical theories concerning the mother-daughter-conflict and female development are considered as well as autobio-graphic material and the authoresses' Œuvres. The historical context, the social and psychohistoric con-ditions, and changes in England during the 19th and beginning 20th century (especially concerning family, female socialisation and role training, motherhood, children's education) are studied and the features and achievements of the female Bildungsroman, that experiences an upswing during this time, emphasized. The dissertation shows the development of the female apprenticeship novel concerning its presentation of mother, daughter, and mother-daughter-relationship and also the enormous progressive-ness of this genre concerning the description of details of this relationship. The analysis demonstrates that all novels show complex and problematic mother-daughter-relationships, that for the daughters are on the one hand traumatic, but on the other hand lead to self-discovery and autonomy. The texts present the mother-daughter-relationship as highly ambivalent, oscillating between love, identification, aggression, rejection, rivalry, and rebellion. In this way they serve to correct the female doctrine and the ideological mother image of the Victorian period as much as the cliché of childhood as an idyllic condition without conflicts, and thus anticipate psychological discoveries and efforts of later periods. Furthermore, it becomes obvious that the authoresses put their own problematic mother-daughter-relationship into literary form and thus try to overcome it; that the fictitious mother-daughter-relation-ships often have a compensatory function. The fact that the analysed novels admit to the mother-daughter-relationship so early such an importance, constitutes their rank and justifies their place in the English literature and culture.
The study at hand deals with madness as it is represented in English Canadian fiction. The topic seemed most interesting and fruitful for analysis due to the fact that as the ways madness has been defined, understood, described, judged and handled differ quite profoundly from society to society, from era to era, as the language, ideas and associations surrounding insanity are both strongly culture-relative and shifting, madness as a theme of myth and literature has always been a excellent vehicle to mirror the assumptions and arguments, the aspirations and nostalgia, the beliefs and values, hopes and fears of its age and society. Thus, while the overall intent of this study is to elucidate some discernible patterns of structure and style which accompany the use of madness in Canadian literature, to investigate the varying sorts of portrayal and the conventions of presentation, to interpret the use of madness as literary devices and to highlight the different statements which are made, the continuity, variation, and changes in the theme of madness provide an informing principle in terms of certain Canadian experiences and perceptions. By examining madness as it represents itself in Canadian literature and considering the respective explorations of the deranged mind within their historical context, I hope to demonstrate that literary interpretations of madness both reflect and question cultural, political, religious and psychological assumptions of their times and that certain symptoms or usages are characteristic of certain periods. Such an approach, it is hoped, might not only contribute towards an assessment of the wealth of associations which surround madness and the ambivalence with which it is viewed, but also shed some light on the Canadian imagination. As such this study can be considered not only as a history of literary madness, but a history of Canadian society and the Canadian mind.