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This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.

Equatorial Guinea is the only former Spanish colony in Africa south of the Sahara. Consequently, the Spanish-language literature produced by its authors has been resistant to classification in both the fields of Hispanic and African literary studies. This thesis examines a selection of contemporary narratives written between 1994 and 2007 by the following authors: José Fernando Siale Djangany, Maximiliano Nkogo Esono, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel and Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng. My main objective in this dissertation is to identify, explain and relate the ways in which post-independence authors express identity in their respective texts. In order to accomplish this task, this thesis posits situational interactions as the key sites for identity expression. Developed from the tenets of symbolic interactionism, the syncretic theoretical model of identity views it as telescopic. It is expected that, through the examination of the chosen texts, a contribution can be made to the understanding of the way in which each author expresses identity and can therefore feed into the larger discussion of identity in Equatorial Guinean narrative.

This thesis is comprised of two parts, a creative work of a full-length novel and a critical exegesis examining three separate but thematically linked texts. Novel: Where the Light Falls: The creative work is a full-length contemporary novel written in the psychological realist style, dealing with a crisis of self. It is narrated in the third person free indirect style. The novel is deeply engaged with the formation of the self and identity, in particular the understanding of the self in relation to the other. Photographic portraiture is also considered at length as a means of representing others and of self-expression. Finally, the novel offers a sustained examination of grief as an emotion that impacts upon and shapes the self. Exegesis: The exegesis considers three ideas: the self, identity and the ethics of portraiture. The nature of the exegesis is to examine the philosophical ideas that arise in the creative work. This thesis argues that the self is an inescapable presence in both photography and writing and that the fraught ethical dimension of portraiture arises because of the difficulties in representing the continuum of self. The exegesis explores three separate texts in chapters related by theme. The first chapter considers the portrait photograph in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, as a metaphor for writing the self. Chapter two explores Susan Sontag’s curiously emotional response the work of Diane Arbus and argues Sontag’s reluctance to acknowledge the affective power of Arbus’s photographic portraits undermines her critique of the photographs on ethical grounds. The final chapter argues that Hervé Guibert’s Ghost Image demonstrates that a degree of subjectivity underpins every photographic act. The thesis relates photography and writing as a means of representing the self and concludes that the ethical concerns that arise in portraiture are common to both forms. (ACCESS RESTRICTED TO ABSTRACT ONLY)

My dissertation focuses on the works of four Latin American writers of Chinese origin: Regino Pedroso from Cuba, Siu Kam Wen from Peru, Óscar Wong from Mexico, and Carlos Francisco Changmarín from Panama. I discuss how first- and second-generation writers rely upon literature to reevaluate and renegotiate their identities. The introduction represents the methodological framework which stems from transcultural, orientalism, translation, and subaltern perspectives. Chapter One explains the trans-Pacific migration of this ethnic group to Peru, Cuba, Mexico and Panama, the social and economic climate in which they were entering, and their cultural contributions. This chapter will also provide an overview of Chinese-Latin American writers in those countries. Chapter Two concentrates on the notions of double consciousness and self-orientalization as they appear in the poetry of Regino Pedroso. Chapter Three covers issues dealing with transculturation, resistance and assimilation in Siu Kam Wen's narratives. In chapter Four, the Mexican poet Óscar Wong infuses his Mayan and Chinese heritage into his poetry creating new spaces and possibilities. In chapter Five, Carlos Francisco Changmarín works to incorporate subaltern voices into his narratives by rewriting history and developing texts that speak from the margins. I conclude that the literary works of this unrecognized group problematize the notion of homogenous identity and provide new personal and collective histories that question the construction of binary oppositions when dealing with issues of race, ethnicity, and class.

Though it has garnered some attention from recent scholars, the field of nineteenth- century Irish literary studies remains neglected. It seems to occupy a rather nebulous space, too "foreign" to be exactly Victorian and too early to be exactly "modern." For Victorianists, the mid- to late-nineteenth century--the heyday of the triple-decker novel--was a time ruled by such writers as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. The English novel proved the measuring stick for most literatures produced within the British Empire, and numerous Irish studies scholars do not see Ireland's literary output as quite measuring up until the appearance of the Modernist texts of the twentieth century. My dissertation moves the conversation beyond the commonplace scholarly lament of the lack of an Irish Middlemarch toward a consideration of Anglo-Irish and Irish genre fiction--Big House fiction, Gothic fiction, the national tale, and folk and fairy tales--as a vital precursor to the national literature that would become the cornerstone of the Celtic Revival. I analyze how writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats manipulated these existing generic forms to construct new national narratives while representing historical and cultural change. Furthermore, my project establishes clear points of connection between the fields of Victorian and Irish studies by examining how "Irishness," which is inextricably linked to rhetorics of nationalism and colonialism, is imagined, employed, and transformed in this era.

Abstract: Abstract in English. Text in French.