This BA thesis analyses female figures in Irish fairy tales and folklore as collected by W.B. Yeats to establish how women were represented in these stories. By analysing Carl Gustav Jung’s...Show moreThis BA thesis analyses female figures in Irish fairy tales and folklore as collected by W.B. Yeats to establish how women were represented in these stories. By analysing Carl Gustav Jung’s archetypal literary criticism, this thesis explores archetypes with the focus on the Mother and the Maiden. This thesis gives close readings of several Irish fairy tales that were selected from Yeats’s anthologies with the purpose of examining figures of the Maiden and the Mother that can be found within fairy tales more closely. Both archetypes can be chiefly be found in the passive figures of the daughter and mother, and it is this passivity that makes them into ‘good’ women. Whereas the figure of the stepmother is far from passive, but her aspirations are always associated with her malevolent nature. The passivity of these female characters is not just unique to Yeats’s fairy tales, but can be generally found in other fairy tales and folklore.Show less
This thesis offers an explanation of Katherine Mansfield’s sterile depiction of colonial life by employing the postcolonial concept of displacement. It examines four of Mansfield’s New Zealand...Show moreThis thesis offers an explanation of Katherine Mansfield’s sterile depiction of colonial life by employing the postcolonial concept of displacement. It examines four of Mansfield’s New Zealand stories, namely “The Woman at the Store” (1912), “Prelude” (1918), “At the Bay” (1922), and “The Garden Party” (1922), and argues that the characters of the woman at the store, Linda Burnell, Beryl Fairfield and Laura Sheridan are displaced postcolonial subjects in the New Zealand landscape. The thesis also demonstrates that these four stories represent the settler existence as imbued with loneliness, alienation and identity crises, and that the protagonists are unable to lead meaningful lives due to the psychological consequences of displacement.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their...Show moreThis thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their assessment of Woolf’s work in relation to disability and illness. This thesis is an intervention in this debate by analyzing how Woolf conceives of and conceptualizes notions of illness and disability. This thesis further aims to investigate whether she can be considered a proto-crip theorist. It argues that Woolf’s ambiguity and contradiction in her attitudes towards disability allow for and encourage a crip theoretical reading, and that ultimately, Woolf can certainly be called a nascent crip theorist in her rejection of bodily normativity and in her celebration of non-normative bodyminds, as well as in the ways in which she deconstructs ableist ideologies. The result is a thesis that offers us significant insights into how Woolf in particular and modernist art, literature, and culture in general, conceived of disability, but it also allows us to trace the continuities and differences between attitudes toward disability during the early twentieth century and these attitudes in the present day.Show less
This thesis offers an analysis of the development of Salman's Rushdie's work through a close reading of two early novels (Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses) and two most recent novels (The...Show moreThis thesis offers an analysis of the development of Salman's Rushdie's work through a close reading of two early novels (Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses) and two most recent novels (The Golden House and Quichotte). The research question is to establish whether a major change in style has taken place. The premise is that a shift seems to have taken place from what Brian McHale calls the ontological dominant in postmodernism to an ethical and moral dominant. This thesis focuses particularly on typical postmodern topics such as the questioning of the ontological relationship between reality and truth, since Rushdie’s style of fantastical writing invites such a focus.Show less
