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While the English-language cultural response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland is well studied, French representations of the conflict have so far gone unobserved. This thesis aims to address this critical omission by examining examples of the most numerous and commercially successful of such responses while the conflict was ongoing: the Troubles thriller. Thrillers on Irish matters are part of the virtually inexhaustible output of thrillers and crime fiction published from the 1960s to 1990s by popular publishers in France. Thrillers on the Troubles featured in several of the genre's most popular series and are an ideal platform to observe French acculturation of the Troubles subject matter and Northern Irish setting during this period. These representations did not come into existence ex nihilo, but are a further iteration of a long-standing French interest in Ireland, Irish domestic affairs, and the "Irish Question". Their representations are therefore examined in light of prior cultural productions as well as contemporary news coverage of the conflict. To facilitate this study, a "French Troubles fiction corpus" was created. Many of these thrillers share features and representational commonalities with the larger English-language oeuvre, replicating common understandings (and misunderstandings) about the Troubles. Using a Marxian-Gramscian framework to explore the range of political discourses, both conservative and revolutionary, present in the corpus, this study charts how French thrillers deterritorialised the conflict and presented the Troubles through the lens of domestic French concerns. The theme of the Troubles thus becomes a lens through which diverse topics as Western and European sovereignty, French post-colonial identity, capitalism, socialism and revolution, nationalism and national identity are all explored. The corpus provides a cross-section of the spy thriller genre at large in France. Through it we can also witness attempts at renewal of the genre in light of political and social vicissitudes that threatened its already fragile standing. Conservative genre stalwarts are seen to give way over time to newer types of protagonists whose heroism is not through rank, standing, or genetics, but derived explicitly from a dialectical relationship with the state. These new post-ideological forms of heroism are examined here through the lens of a Hegelian dialectic of the Spirit. Later works also demonstrate further diversification of the Troubles theme. A reading of these novels informed by the Hegelian notion of Widerspruch reveals the use of the Northern Irish setting as one of acute crisis that makes possible interrogation of identity, freedom and reality. The French Troubles fiction corpus created for this study also reveals an evolution of the subject matter after the conflict's end, indicating an alteration in the French apprehension of the Troubles and contemporary Northern Ireland. This project prompts further study of a cultural phenomenon whose representational forms shift continually as new works are produced and whose story is not yet over.

This thesis examines narrative constructions of motherhood in popular children’s novels published in the U.K. between 1945 and 1960. The interrogation considers family fictions intended for readers of nine years onwards, alongside narratives of development aimed at a female teenage audience of up to sixteen years. It focuses on texts by women writers, most of whom have received little or no attention from scholars in the field of children’s literature. In the case of two better-known authors (Enid Blyton and Noel Streatfeild) the thesis analyses elements of their work that have not previously been scrutinised. The study argues that the novels offer significant representations of maternity which are in dialogue with societal narratives on the changing role of mothers in post-war Britain. It proposes that, as widely-read texts that affirm and challenge received ideals of motherhood, these stories, conventional in form, are open to both compliant and resistant readings that would have played an active role in the creation of subject positions for the young reader. Combining evidence from socio-historic sources as well as literary texts, the research investigates the discursive engagement of the corpus in five substantive chapters, each indicative of shared thematic ideological preoccupations. Performative motherhood is examined through the lenses of the significance of home, domesticity and housework, so-called ‘working mothers’, maternal responsibility for feeding, and the maintenance of femininity. In bringing together such varied aspects of maternal discourse, the thesis makes innovative links between the history, sociology and children’s fiction of motherhood in this period. By rehabilitating formerly well-read, but now-neglected non-canonical works, this study contributes new perspectives within the academy for both children’s literature and motherhood studies. It concludes by evaluating the extent to which maternal ideology of the long 1950s remains a potent force in mothering today, demonstrating that these texts still have resonance.

From the 1820s, forçats were widely portrayed in French culture across a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres. This thesis analyses this ‘convict tradition’, and relates it to the emergence of industrial literature in France, with its resolutely reader-centred approach. It argues that convicts acquired a central cultural importance in the nineteenth century because they embodied a form of transgressive individualism which fascinated bourgeois readers. Convicts functioned as screens onto which readers could project their own forbidden desires. The study analyses canonical novels by Sand, Balzac, Hugo and Zola alongside a large corpus of non-fiction, including biographies, penological or philanthropic texts, physiologies and travel literature. The circulation of stereotypes and stylistic tropes between these different genres shows the constant interaction between mainstream and elite writing, and the influence of literary representations on the perception of criminals, which shaped political decisions and penal policy. The first chapter of the study suggests that convicts gave a face to nineteenth-century concerns about the proliferation of the criminal classes, thereby allowing readers to explore these fears. At the same time, descriptions of crime were a source of scopophilic pleasure, allowing readers to indulge repressed transgressive desires, while partaking in a potentially subversive celebration of carnivalesque disorder. Chapter 2 shows how these dynamics inform Balzac’s writing in his ‘Vautrin cycle’, drawing readers into a game of open secrets and deferred recognition, which mirrors contemporary concerns about urban illegibility and illegitimate social promotion. Chapter 3 explores a competing tradition which portrayed convicts as sublime, betraying the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to imprisonment, which could be a sign of infamy or of martyrdom. Sublime convicts reassured readers about the human ability to overcome trials, and to attain salvation through spiritual means (ataraxia) or physical resistance (escape). These differing traditions show that narratives tended to be centred upon their readers’ concerns, which may explain why criminals themselves were discouraged from writing. Chapter 4 presents the obstacles to convict self-expression as well as various attempts by inmates to ‘write back’, culminating with Genet’s and Charrière’s subversive reappropriation of literary discourse. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which the interplay between political events, commercial imperatives, literary evolutions (the rise of the detective novel) and new cultural practices like the cinema changed twentieth-century representations of convicts. This thesis analyses a large corpus of understudied material and fills a gap in existing scholarship, but more importantly it uses convicts to explore nineteenth-century reading practices, and to probe cultural fault lines in post-revolutionary French society. Convicts exemplify the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to social marginality, and highlight the conflicted nature of bourgeois identity. Their portrayal also draws attention to the important structural changes undergone by the literary field from the 1830s onwards, which paved the way for the advent of mass culture in the twentieth century.

This thesis is an examination of the mass-market publishing industry in Britain after the First World War and of the 'literature' read by the lower-middle and working classes: novels and weekly magazines. We chronicle the development of the industry both generally and through the experiences of three publishers, examine the activity and motivations of the reading public and consider the treatment of contemporary issues and attitudes within popular fiction as a useful barometer for the historian. There are seven chapters. Chapter 1 considers the period before 1914 in order to provide the necessary background for an understanding of the focus of this study, 1914-1950. The origins of the popular publishing industry and Wilkie Collins' 'Unknown Public' are examined and continuities with post-1914 popular literature traced. In Chapter 2 a broad overview of our period is conducted: the development of the industry and of the market, the influence of war and the depression, and the effect on reading of the growth of other leisure activities. Chapters 3 and 5 look at the reading habits of adults and children/adolescents from the lower-middle and working classes. In both cases contemporaries and readers themselves seemed to think 'escapism' was paramount in the selection of 'light' fiction and there was therefore a significant continuity between child and adult reading. Finally, Chapters 4, 6 and 7 focus on the histories and influence of three publishers of popular fiction during this period. These include two of the most successful (Mills and Boon, D.C. Thomson) and in contrast, a prominent but declining firm (The Religious Tract Society). In each case the complex relationship between market forces and editorial policies is discussed. We conclude that a reciprocal relationship existed between publisher and reader, with the latter dictating much of what was published. Popular fiction, moreover, served to reinforce predominant stereotypes and ideological views of society rather than to impose specific doctrine.

With over 350 million books sold worldwide in more than 80 languages, Paulo Coelho is an international literary phenomenon that moves “beyond culture of origin” (Damrosch 199) and inhabits the “world literary space” (Pascale 281). Would his novels, therefore, stand as materialization of Goethe’s humanist cosmopolitan vision upon the coinage of the term world literature? Many cultural scholars would argue to the contrary. This dissertation aims at exploring Coelho narratives and their popularity and controversial reception by contextualizing them within the contemporary scholarship on World Literature and within the global cultural economy. An underlying assumption of this Cultural Studies approach to Coelho’s oeuvre is that popular literature, as the hors concours cultural site of hegemonic struggles, has much to offer to literary scholarship. This dissertation applies the premises of rhetorical narrative criticism and cognitive theory (Unnatural Narratology, specifically) to answer the question: How do readers incorporate Coelho narratives to their lived-cultures? To that end, this dissertation explores the narrative elements in Coelho’s novels – implied author, authorial audience, settings, characters, narration, structure, ethos/pathos, etc. – as well as possible interpretation pathways to such elements. Particular attention is paid to the author’s major themes, namely, self-realization journey, cultural hybridity, and anti-mimesis, and their respective significance to transnational audiences. Furthermore, the cultural-material conditions from which Coelho novels stem are discussed in this study by examining the correlation between these narratives and issues such as postmodernism, globalization, the convergence culture, mass self-communication, and others. This dissertation argues that the production, circulation, and consumption of Paulo Coelho novels constitute cultural processes that are more complex than his critics have typically considered. These are highly intertextual, born-translated, postmodern narratives that embody the practices of a globalized, digitalized, participatory, self-contradictory, and uneven cultural economy. Despite their narrative simplicity, Coelho novels function as contact zones to their remarkably diverse audience, dialogically yielding and celebrating cultural hybridization, promoting the Goethean tolerance among different cultures, and potentially encouraging a critique of our narratively constructed social reality.

Examines George Orwell’s engagement with popular literature throughout the 1930s and 1940s, decades of unprecedented efficiency in media production and dissemination. Argues that mass media technology informs Orwell’s literary methods and anti-authoritarian politics as early as his first, overlooked novel, Burmese Days (1934). This novel is one of the first examples of the author’s career-long critique of clubs, whose reliance on cheap journals and paperbacks promotes truncated, monochromatic language and ideology. The club environment for Orwell is therefore a synecdoche for totalitarian society. I focus on media ecology to address questions about conventional and even pro-colonial aspects in Burmese Days, arguing that Orwell uses tropes in his writing to suggest the impossibility of removing his work from the capitalist economy. My thesis will engage with larger questions about the interaction between politics and literature, focusing on points in Orwell’s writing where he explores the dialectic between media economy and literary products. I position Orwell as a thinker interested in questions akin to those of the media critics Theodor Adorno and Marshall McLuhan, although Orwell began to arrive at similar conclusions before either Adorno or McLuhan published their seminal works.

Kenya boasts of its high production of popular culture materials. Music, TV shows, movies, popular fiction and now, in this social media age, memes, GIFs and short video clips. All these are tailored to respond to the prevailing social, economic and political conditions in the country. While they are mostly humorous and entertaining, the primary goal of many of these popular culture artefacts is to critique contemporary Kenya. Despite its consumption though, popular culture has remained highly undervalued and unappreciated as a tool for cultural, social and political transformation. Many Kenyans consume popular culture texts solely for entertainment purposes. Popular fiction, since it is studied and examined in Kenya’s exam-oriented schools, is arguably the only form of popular culture that is seen as a means to an end – passing one’s exams. This end however, is hardly what authors usually have in mind when they produce the texts, considering their contents.This thesis examines Kidagaa Kimemwozea, a Swahili novel by Ken Walibora, as a representation and critique of postcolonial Kenya’s social, cultural and political situation. Exploring the political leadership of postcolonial Kenya, class dynamics and relations as well as gender issues, I argue that Walibora’s novel does not only expose the Kenyan bourgeoisie’s cunningness in their oppression of the proletarians and the male ruse to dominate their female counterparts, but it also proposes excellent paths of emancipation for the proletarians and women, and should thus be given scholarly attention.

My project presses to include popular fiction, television, and film for serious critical consideration. To contextualize my research, I use theories that critically examine popular literature, connecting to the work of Janice Radway and Keenan Norris, and I study the African-American focus on class as explored by E. Franklin Frazier. In focusing on the popular, I highlight the everydayness of class and race anxieties. I build on Gwendolyn Foster’s work on class passing but stress racial intersections with identity performance. I rely on New Historicism and Critical Race Theory to substantiate my examination of the literature. I look at specific moments in black America in the latter 20th century as inspiring literary responses to class concerns. My research contributes to the cultural discourse on respectability politics and racial uplift. Challenging the class focus of African-Americans, through literature, television, and film, I seek to reenergize discussions on the routes to black equality in America and contest notions of “making it” advanced by some cultural critics. My approach undermines the idea that class performances including, sartorial presentation, linguistic codeswitching, and distance from racial justice conversations can cover racial realities. The historical focus on lifting and climbing to a better American experience has attenuated the African-American community’s power and my project intervenes in the discourse on the best path forward. In concentrating on the hollowness of “making it,” I hope to encourage a re-prioritization of holistic racial uplift over respectability politics and class.

This dissertation intends to delineate and explore the work of Shibata Renzaburo (1917-1978), author of kengo shosetsu novels, the genre of historical and adventure novels, which occupies a large and important niche in popular Japanese literature of the twentieth century. Shibata Renzaburo is widely known in Japan; his works have seen numerous editions and reprints, and a number of his most popular works have been adapted for film and television. Shibata Renzaburo is an iconic writer in that he was instrumental in establishing and solidifying the kengo shosetsu genre, a genre in which stories were usually set in the Edo period (1603-1868) and which involved elaborate plots and revolved around fictional master swordsmen, featuring intrigue, adventure, masterful swordplay, and fast-paced narratives. While the notion of a master swordsman protagonist was not new and came about during the prewar period, Shibata’s writing differed from prewar works in several important aspects. One of the points of difference is the role and influence of French literature in Shibata’s work, in particular, in the character of Nemuri Kyoshiro, the protagonist of the eponymous Nemuri Kyoshiro series.

My dissertation project investigates the late nineteenth-century German Kolportageroman (colportage novel). Colportage novels, serial novels sold by door-to-door book salesman, constituted an important nexus of influence in nineteenth-century popular print culture. Their connection to other media and genres such as the periodical press and classical drama has, however, not been recognized. My dissertation remedies this by exploring the broader cultural significance of these novels as key in the development of early mass media and culture in Germany. My approach to the colportage novel draws on theoretical notions from media studies and literary scholarship to broaden a literary understanding of the narrative qualities and cultural importance of “cheap literature” and the strategies of modern serialization. The colportage novels’ serialization and their interconnection with the larger media and literary landscape offers a perspective on this literature that contrasts with traditional literary scholarship, which has been largely unable to divorce itself from the idea that inexpensive, mass-produced popular literature is simplistic, detrimental to its readers, and symptomatic of social inequality. In my work, I discovered that the novels had a close, competitive and symbiotic relationship with news, adapting current events into novelizations almost as soon as they occurred. I was also surprised to discover that the novels sometimes adapted canonical works of German literature. Reflection on the contradictory convergences between the news and fiction, high and low, whole and fragment in many of these novels sheds light on this neglected literary form as a kind of literature that was exciting, current and provided readers with much more than merely romance or excitement. An overarching theme in my findings is what I call an “aesthetic of authentication” that seems to be a unifying trait in colportage novels that also links them to observations other scholars have made about nineteenth century popular culture. Authentication strategies were built into the production, marketing and texts of colportage novels, offering readers the pleasure of meditating on details, examining disparate accounts of events, and sifting through “evidence,” which was sometimes supplied in the form of illustrations or other graphic supplements. In the first instance, I examine the fictionalization of current events as an example of the intersection between reportage and colportage. Colportage novels almost kept pace with newspapers, presenting fictional accounts of events like the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) already in 1870. One nineteenth-century publisher suggested that many people subscribed to colportage novels as an alternative to weekly newspapers. Examining colportage novels within the context of the larger media landscape shows how popular fiction and news reporting spurred each other on in terms of setting the public agenda and in creating an appetite for periodicals and serial fiction. In the context of the second topic, I study the unexpected overlap between the traditional canon and colportage novels and the way in which colportage authors engaged with their sources. Rather than slavishly imitating them or simplifying them, the two adaptations I examine show that the novels were active and explicit in dismantling and analyzing their sources, dramatizing literary critique and rendering the source material in an expansive and multivocal way. The novels also expand on these stories with subplots and new characters. Adaptations of canonical literature are evidence that this popular print form employed notions of canon and quality in its narrative and publication strategies, even while it openly flouted inherited notions of authorship and writing. Serial literature, including colportage novels, was a worldwide sensation in the late nineteenth century, but has now largely been forgotten. Book covers with prices in four or more currencies, and illustrations with trilingual captions are evidence of a vast global network of popular literature that was experiencing incredible growth at the turn of the twentieth century. Some colportage novels met with international success, but there were also national niche bestsellers. My project situates colportage novels within a single national print culture, but contributes to a transnational discussion already underway among historians and literary scholars working on other types of serial fiction.

From historiographies to dramas, captivity narratives to mercantile ledgers, Anglo-Muslim studies has been in pursuit of an overall conceptualization the uniquely insular English population had of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire. But to approach an understanding of what the English thought of the Turk, one must necessarily consider the broad range of socio-political and economic conditions of the various echelons of English society. This dissertation explores a popular literature that - although a significant number of these texts exist that deals with the crucial relationship between Christians and Muslims - has heretofore never been considered as a whole in the context of how they represent the Muslim Turk. Broadside ballads, consumed widely and across the social and economic spectrum, were more accessible to and often indeed written expressly for the poor population of England who were largely illiterate and had little to no expendable time or income, and the Turk was a favored metaphor in broadside ballad literature throughout the seventeenth century. I argue that the function of the term “Turk” in seventeenth century broadside ballads depended so much on (and whose fluctuation was so closely attuned to) local politics that the term was largely stripped of any meaning, functioning simply as an “enemy” against which the English compared themselves and defined proper “Englishness.” My dissertation moves from the early decades of the century and the drama and discourse around piracy, through the tumultuous English Civil Wars and Interregnum, and through the Exclusion Crisis and the invasion of Vienna by Ottoman forces in order to trace the evolution of the presence of the Turk in popular broadside ballad. My research shows that Muslims performed a crucial function in the construction of the English identity, and no body of literature illustrates how closely the term “Turk” was linked to “not English” as clearly as the popular broadside ballad.

This dissertation studies imaginative reading and its relationship to fanfiction. Imaginative reading is a practice that involves engaging the imagination while reading, mentally constructing a picture of the characters and settings described in the text. Readers may imaginatively watch and listen to the narrated action, using imagination to recreate the characters’ sensations and emotions. To those who frequently read this way, imagining readers, the text can become, through the work of imagination, a play or film visualized or entered. The readers find themselves inside the world of the text, as if transported to foreign lands and foreign eras, as if they have been many different people, embodied in many different fictional characters. By engaging imaginatively and emotionally with the text, the readers can enter into the fictional world: the settings seem to them like locations they can visit, the many characters like roles they can inhabit or like real people with whom they can interact as imaginary friends and lovers. The readers feel that they have been absorbed into the world of the text, and sometimes into the characters. One genre of literature is particularly closely connected to the act of imaginative reading: Internet fanfiction. In fact, imaginative reading is the source of Internet fanfiction and thereby shapes many of the genre’s characteristics. Bringing imaginative reading to bear on fanfiction texts reveals characteristics of these texts and of the genre in which they participate. Because imaginative reading, especially of culturally devalued texts by young women, is frequently decried by critics, fanfiction, which is frequently written by young women about these culturally devalued texts, is often tarred with the same brush. Thus many of the characteristics of fanfiction derive from fan writers’ attempts to avoid the stigmas accruing to imaginative reading and readers.

"I can be a regular bitch. Just try me." With this phrase emblazoned across her t-shirt, Lisbeth Salander, pierced, tattooed, and bedecked in leather, waltzes from the pages of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This woman who subverts authority, maliciously tattoos and sodomizes a man, and intentionally distances herself from close relationships of any kind has somehow managed to capture both the attention and admiration of the American audience. This disheartening phenomenon stems from a renewed interest in the Byronic heroine, a female possessing those traits traditionally assigned to Byronic heroes and men, and the rise of the Byronic heroine, as I will discuss, is intrinsically linked to the ebb and flow of the Third Wave of feminism. Hermione (Harry Potter) offers a picture of a heroine that embodies the Second Wave's agenda; she is intelligent, independent, and only barely Byronic. While Katniss (Hunger Games) and Lisbeth (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) are thoroughly Byronic, the plots surrounding these heroines greatly contrast the fates of previous Byronic heroines. Unfortunately, though their lives may be saved, their futures are lost. The breakdown of the gender binary, as seen in the rise of the successful Byronic heroine, does not bode well for the future of a society that insists on culturally-constructed gender. Though the First and Second Wave produce innocuous literary ripples, such as Hermione Granger, the leap into the deep end of the Third Wave, accompanied by characters like Katniss Everdeen and Lisbeth Salander, is not only alarming, but it is also cause for immediate concern. By first examining the history of feminism and its literary products, and then by establishing a connections between Byronism and education, I will lay the groundwork for my argument, ultimately establishing that the cultural reception of each of these two Byronic heroines, Katniss and Lisbeth, indicates the permeating, damaging effects of the Third Wave's attempt to eliminate gender binaries, seen to its fruition through emancipatory education.

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the relationship between genre and the representation of war-time violence in five texts written during and shortly after the United States Civil War (1861-1865). The texts are The Narrative of Edmund Wright (1864), John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), and three short stories by Henry James—“The Story of a Year” (1865), “Poor Richard” (1867), and “A Most Extraordinary Case” (1868). These texts deal with the theme of war violence through generic mechanisms associated with the spectrum of writings often dichotomized as romance and realism. The main theoretical approach to genre depends on a distinction between criterial theories of genre and contingency theories of genre. Criterial theories emphasize the shared characteristics of literary texts: that is, criterial theories of genre are classificatory in orientation. Contingency theories emphasize the ways in which social forces influence the act of classification: contingency theories of genre, in other words, concentrate on the notion that genres are social constructs. This dissertation maintains, in line with contingency theory, that genre is affected by the social, political and cultural circumstances of the period in which the genre operates; as a result, this dissertation uses documents from and about the American Civil War to substantiate its claims. The work of Alice Fahs, David Reynolds, and John Frow has influenced the approach to genre theory and to nineteenth-century American literary history.

Abstract: One of the main aims of this thesis is to examine the translational situation of popular fiction in post-industrial Japan. Specifically, the goal is to uncover two main aspects surrounding the phenomenon of translationese, the language used in translation. One aspect to be investigated is the characteristic features of Japanese translationese, and the other is readers’ attitudes toward translationese. This research is conducted within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury, 1995). The literature review includes a background of how translationese has been approached previously and how methods from different fields (e.g., corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics) can be used in the research of translation. Through the review of the historical background of Japanese translationese and the development of Japanese writing styles, it is revealed that the translation norm in Japan had been very closely oriented toward the original text. In the text analysis, the corpora consist of translations from English and non-translations (i.e., originally written in Japanese) in the genre of popular fiction. The goal of the text analysis is to determine whether the features of translationese are actually characteristics of translationese. The features selected for this examination include the following: 1) overt personal pronouns; 2) more frequent loanwords; 3) female specific language; 4) abstract nouns as grammatical subjects of transitive verbs; and 5) longer paragraphs. Two features (third person pronouns and longer paragraphs) are shown to be characteristic of translationese, while others were proven otherwise or questionable (loan words, female language, abstract nouns as subjects of transitive verbs). Findings from the investigation of readers’ attitudes can help identify what constitutes the “norms” of translation (Toury, 1995, 1999) in Japanese society. Readers appear to be able to tell the difference between translation and non-translation. However, readers’ attitudes toward both translationese and non-translationese are more or less neutral or slightly positive. This may indicate that Japanese translationese has become integrated into the contemporary Japanese writing system and that readers do not regard translationese as overtly negative. This study shows that the major translation norm is becoming more domesticated translation in popular fiction, with the focus on making translations easier for the readers.

This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and responsibilities of wives and mothers, and debates about marriage, as well as a review of women tried for murder in the Middlesex assize courts between 1558 and 1625. Chapter Three, comprised of four subsections, engages in critical readings of approximately 52 pamphlets, ballads, and plays published in the same period. Individual subsections discuss how traitorous wives, murderous mothers, women who murder in their communities, and punishment and redemption are represented in the narratives. Woodcut illustrations printed in these texts are also examined, and their iconographic contributions to the construction of bad women is discussed. Women who murder in these texts are represented as consummately evil creatures capable of inflicting terrible harm to their families and communities, and are consistently discovered, captured, and executed by their communities for their heinous crimes. Murderous women in early modern popular literature also provided a means for contemporary men and women to explore, confront, and share in the depths of sin, while anticipating their own spiritual salvation. Pamphlets, plays, and broadsides related bawdy, graphic, and violent stories that allow modern readers a glimpse of the popular culture and mental world of Renaissance England.

This thesis is a study of the emerging subgenre of category romance novels that depict interracial relationships, specifically relationships between black women and white men. Employing textual analysis of twenty-six novels published from 1995-2005, by romance publishers such as Harlequin, Silhouette, and Genesis Press, and situating them as category romance novels targeted towards a black female audience and written by black female authors, this study argues that these novels constitute a new subgenre, and that the conventions and themes that are common to these novels conceptualize racial difference as the most salient issue in the depiction of interracial romantic relationships, while simultaneously arguing that romantic love is fundamentally apolitical.

Children's series books have historically been frowned upon by educators and librarians alike. Due to this, thousands of the books have been disregarded as the equivalent of ‘trashy' literature for children, and have thus been excluded from the classroom. How has this scorn gained credence? Are series legitimate reading material for children? This paper explores the history and the beneficial uses of children's series books in the classroom. Series books aid in the teaching of reading and provide a forum for children to gain literary confidence. They also assist in the learning of other languages and are instrumental in reading intervention situations. Specifically, this paper considers the literary aspects, practical applications, and criticism directed at the Nancy Drew and Harry Potter series. Examined closely, series prove to be highly educational and indispensable to the formation of lifelong readers.

What is the American Dream? Where did this idea come from? Why is this idea so important to the American consciousness? In this thesis I will attempt to answer these questions and show that the American Dream is an integral element of the American character. The American Dream is defined by looking at popular literature, mainly magazine articles, that discuss and celebrate this idea. By surveying historical documents and popular literature, I will show how the idea of the American Dream evolved through the history of the United States — from early British settlements to the industrial revolution of the late 1800's. And, by looking at four novels popular in the late 1970's and the 1980's, I will show that this idea is still viable in today's society. Finally, by taking a realistic look at the American economy, beginning in the 1980's to the present day, I will show that, even though accomplishing this Dream is more difficult than ever before in the history of the United States, the American Dream still prospers.

Cowboy poetry has only recently begun to receive attention not just as an entity itself but as an important reflection of regional American life. In the past, cowboy poetry was simply something cowboys wrote to express what they felt about the land and their work on that land, about their life and their reactions to it. Sometimes they wrote this poetry only for themselves; sometimes they shared it with other cowboys gathered in the evenings around the campfire. Rarely did anyone else ever read it, and when it did surface in such places as the Miles City Stock Growers Journal. The Pacific Monthly or The Arizona Globe, it was generally dismissed as "doggerel" by the general public. These poetic accounts, however, deserve more attention than the epithet "doggerel" would indicate, for their lines contain an encapsulated account of what life as a cowboy was like, not only during the era of major cattle drives and large ranches but also today. The cultural values and the sense of history such poetry contains are rarely attainable elsewhere in such vivid and succinct form; as such, it provides an invaluable arena for viewing aspects of American western life.