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The main aim of "Her Idoll Selfe"? Shaping Identity in Early Modern Women- Self-Writings is to offer fresh readings of as yet little-read early modern women- texts. I look at a variety of texts that are either explicitly concerned with the constitution of the writer- self, such as the autobiographies by Lady Grace Mildmay and Martha Moulsworth, or in which the preoccupation with the self is of a more indirect nature, as in the mothers" advice books by Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Richardson or the anonymous M. R., or even in women- poetry, drama and religious verse. I situate the texts in the context of early modern discourses of femininity and subjectivity to pursue the question in how far it was possible for early modern women to achieve a sense of agency in spite of their culturally marginal position. In that, my readings aim to contribute to the ongoing critical process of decentring the early modern period. At the same time, I draw on contemporary theory as a methodological tool that can open up further dimensions of the texts, especially in places where the texts provide clues and parallels that lend themselves to a theoretical approach. Conversely, the texts themselves shed interesting light on feminist and poststructuralist theory and can serve as testing grounds for the current critical fascination with fragmentation and hybridity. Having outlined the theoretical and methodological framework of my study, I then analyse the women- writings with reference to a matrix of paradigmatic dimensions that encompass their most prominently recurring themes: the notion of writing the self, relationships between self and other, demarcations of private and public, the women- notorious preoccupation with self-loss and death, as well as the recurrent theme of the "golden meane". I suggest that this motif can provide the vital cue to early modern women- constitution of self. The idea of a precarious "golden meane" links in with to parallel discourses of moderation and balance at the time, but reinterprets them in a manner that can present a workable and innovative paradigm of subjectivity. Instead of subscribing to a model of decentred selfhood, early modern women- presentations of self suggest that a concluding but contested compromise is a workable strategy to achieve a form of selfhood that can responsibly be lived with.
This guide is meant to provide some initial bibliographical assistance to those who want to study the historical evolution of ecological thinking in Canada on the basis of poetry. A major theoretical assumption underlying this project is that literature gives privileged access to a nation's cultural memory. Even a cursory survey of Canadian literary history supplies ample evidence for the marked presence of ecological attitudes in Canada's mental history. The origin of these attitudes can be traced back to at least the 18th century. By way of generalising, one could argue that literature reflects, and provides subtle insights into, how both native Canadians and immigrant settlers have responded to their 'eco-sphere'. For many Canadian texts bear witness to a thematic preoccupation with the Canadian oikos-area (oikos signifying 'house' in a narrower sense but also 'habitat' in a wider), to which its inhabitants have established a meaningful relationship. No doubt, even a preliminary attempt to explore ecological attitudes in Canadian literature more systematically would be a multi-facetted and difficult task. One of the major practical problems that poses itself immediately is: Which texts could, and ought to be examined? For there are innumerous references to environmental attitudes and ideas in all literary genres -- also in a great many fictional texts, both traditional and contemporary. For the purpose of research and study it would be extremely helpful indeed, if there were comprehensive bibliographical aids that would enable us to approach, and familiarize ourselves with, all these texts more conveniently. But the challenge of collecting pertinent data of this general kind would have been far beyond my scope and resources. This is why the present guide limits its focus to poetry. The working hypotheses motivating this tentative compilation are: i. Poetry is a more ubiquitous literary genre than fiction and drama. According to available evidence, more writers seem to have tried out their skills on poetry than on fiction and drama. Therefore poetry is likely to mirror a greater variety of voices and sentiments. ii. Poems are still a relatively untapped source in the current discussion about the environment. However, a great many poetic texts lend themselves to supplying relevant arguments that could be used in various fields of action such as environmental ethics, evironmental education and, last but not least, conservation. iii. Apart from smaller pieces of the "nature writing" variety, poems dealing with nature and environmental issues are comparatively short, aiming as they do at a single focus and effect. This is why they can be opened up for critical inspection more easily than selected passages from, say, a novel, which would have to be related to the context of the whole work. iv. This guide attempts to direct the user's attention to poems that are accessible in anthologies. A strong argument for selecting poems from anthologies rather than from individual writers' collections is that the anthology editors are likely to have selected precisely those poems of whose appeal to their respective readerships they must have been thoroughly convinced. Thus the mere fact that a poem has been anthologized suggests that it can be considered an important element in the process of Canadian culture building. Therefore, the very poems that have been frequently anthologized could perhaps serve as special barometers of the Canadian ecological sensibility at a given historical moment.
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.
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.
In Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, Toni Morrison negotiates ways of individual and collective identity formation through figurations of space and trauma. In geographical spaces that are public and private, open and closed, inclusive and exclusive, space of the past and spaces of the present, Morrison writes discursive spaces in which to create individual and communal African American history and identity, based on the traumatic hi-stories at the core of the Black American experience: the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, just to name a few. In the three novels, Toni Morrison subscribes to a postmodern notion of space and place, presenting it as relative to the individual- frame of mind. Places are used as metonymies for the protagonists" traumatized minds and their different ways of dealing with trauma. Trauma that is not worked through and transcended is presented by Morrison as impacting the protagonists- ability to fashion a home out of a vast and often hostile space. The physical and mental space of Morrison- protagonists is occupied by historical traumata that disables the protagonists to find a place in the present without revisiting the places of their troubled past. While this burdens their lives, it also opens up a historical and metahistorical discourse that allows the revision of mainstream historiography to include minority histories of oppression and trauma. Morrison reconfigures the American historical landscape by emphasizing the subjectivity of any history and offering alternatives to historical grand narratives through her historiographic metafiction. All three novels explore the possibility of reconciliation between past trauma and present life. Doing so requires Morrison to send her protagonists on strenuous journeys through time and space in order to visit the past trauma that keeps them from making a home in the here and now. The protagonists venture back to the primal scenes that bear major significance for their lives but have been suppressed for being too painful to remember. Their pain thus awakens anew, but out of it grow the possibility of a life in the present and the hope for a future. The pasts Morrison thus digs up serve as anchors to situate the African American place in the American historical landscape. Those primal places have a geographical as well as a historical and psychological quality, as places in Morrison- novels are often used as metonymies for the protagonists" traumatized minds, containing the memory of the traumatic past. By spatializing time, Morrison makes history accessible to a communal working through, thus countering the modernist impulse to treat memory as a private faculty embedded in the individual- psyche. This makes it difficult, for African Americans with individual recollections of slavery and racist oppression for example, to use traumatic memory as the basis for a common sense of identity. Morrison uses spatialized time as a forum to discover this basis, to allow for the establishment of a common historical bond. At the same time, she warns against instrumentalizing a common history to exclude those who do not share it. Any history, for Morrison, should be open and flexible enough to accommodate different perspectives. Essentially, Morrison suggests that western historiography is a discursive construct. By allowing, in all three novels, a polyphonic weaving of different equal histories to destablize a single, authoritative, hegemonic historiography, Morrison gives African Americans the power to construct her own past, her own present, and thereby claim back her identity. Moreover, Morrison destabilizes the duality of private space and public space that has long served to distinguish subjective individual memory from objective communal history and thus to legitimize certain accounts of history at the expense of others. The gendered as well as the racial other, by virtue of being excluded from the public sphere, have been excluded from their own historicization. By opening up the private sphere of personal trauma and loss, Morrison spatializes personal memory in a way that it forms a parallel public sphere in which African Americans may negotiate their historicity, move out of the timelessness of the private into the historicized public. By opening up the traditionally private sphere of the home to the public and turning it into a deeply political place, Morrison redefines home in a way that it does not necessarily conform to the classic view of a closed-off shelter but rather a transient place with flexible boundaries that allows for the formation of liberated individual and communal identities out of (hi)stories of pain and trauma.
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.
The first part of this thesis offers a theoretical foundation for the analysis of Tolkien- texts. Each of the three fields of interest, nostalgia, utopia, and the pastoral tradition, are introduced in separate chapters. Special attention is given to the interrelations of the three fields. Their history, meaning, and functions are shortly elaborated and definitions applicable to their occurrences in fantasy texts are reached. In doing so, new categories and terms are proposed that enable a detailed analysis of the nostalgic, pastoral, and utopian properties of Tolkien- works. As nostalgia and utopia are important ingredients of pastoral writing, they are each introduced first and are finally related to a definition of the pastoral. The main part of this thesis applies the definitions and insights reached in the theoretical chapters to Tolkien- The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. This part is divided into three main sections. Again, the order of the chapters follows the line of argumentation. The first section contains the analysis of pastoral depictions in the two texts. Given the separation of the pastoral into different categories, which were outlined in the theoretical part, the chapters examine bucolic and georgic pastoral creatures and landscapes before turning to non-pastoral depictions, which are sub-divided into the antipastoral and the unpastoral. A separate chapter looks at the bucolic and georgic pastoral- positions and functions in the primary texts. This analysis is followed by a chapter on men- special position in Tolkien- mythology, as their depiction reveals their potential to be both pastoral and antipastoral. The second section of the analytical part is concerned with the role of nostalgia within pastoral culture. The focus is laid on the meaning and function of the different kinds of nostalgia, which were defined in the theoretical part, detectable in bucolic and georgic pastoral cultures. Finally, the analysis turns to the utopian potential of Tolkien- mythology. Again, the focus lies on the pastoral and non-pastoral creatures. Their utopian and dystopian visions are presented and contrasted. This way, different kinds of utopian vision are detected and set in relation to the overall dystopian fate of Tolkien- fictional universe. Drawing on the results of this thesis and on Terry Gifford- ecocritical work, the final chapter argues that Tolkien- texts can be defined as modern pastorals. The connection between Tolkien- work and pastoral literature made explicit in the analysis is thus cemented in generic terms. The conclusion presents a summary of the central findings of this thesis and introduces questions for further study.
1.The Discursive Construction of Black Masculinity: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality
1.1.The Plight of Black Men: A History of Lynchings and Castrations
1.2.The Discursive Construction of the Black Man as Otherrn
1.3.Black Corporeality and the Scopic Regime of Racism
2. Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible man'
2.1.Invisible Black Men: Between Emasculation and Hypermasculinityrn
2.2.Transcending Invisibility
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.
As a target for condemnation, the thematic prevalence of racism in African American novels of satire is not surprising. In order to confront this vice in its shifting manifestations, however, the African American satirist has to employ special techniques. This thesis examines some of these devices as they occur in George Schuyler- Black No More, Charles Wright- The Wig, and Percival Everett- Erasure. Given the reciprocity of target and technique in the satiric context, close attention is paid to how the authors under study locate and interrogate racism in their narratives. In this respect, the significance of anti-essentialist Marxist criticism in Schuyler- Black No More and the author- portrayal of the society of his time as capitalist machinery is examined. While Schuyler is concerned with exposing the general socioeconomic workings of the 1920s from a Marxist perspective, Wright offers the reader perspective into how this oppressive machinery psychologically manipulates and corrupts the individual in the historic context of Lyndon B. Johnson- political vision of the Great Society. Everett then elaborates on the epistemological concern which is traceable in Wright- work and addresses the role media representation plays in manufacturing images and rigid categories that shape systematic racism. As such, the present study not only highlights the versatility of satire as a rhetorical secret weapon and thus ventures toward the idiosyncrasies of the African American novel of satire, it also makes an effort to trace the ever-changing face of racial discrimination.