This dissertation analyzes the use of discourses of religious conversion in twelfth and thirteenth century Old French and Old Provencal romance fiction. The discourses of religious conversion are here defined to include narrative conventions of Christian scripture, hagiography, …
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This dissertation explores how Anglo-Saxon hagiographers negotiate between didactic prohibitions of sorrow and the generic conventions which encourage the representation of mourning men. I examine cases where an author exploits these conventions to emphasize and thus defend his …
To fully understand any text, it is necessary to understand the genre of that text. The genre of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, however, is very unclear, even at the most basic level. Most interpreters assume that prophecy is a type of rhetoric, but they also speak of …
In this project, I examine how the Senegalese women writers engaged with Islam to liberate Muslim women from the patriarchal system since the birth of the Senegalese women's writing until now. The analysis of narratives by Nafissatou Diallo, Aminata Maïga Ka, Ken Bugul, Fatou Di…
We will demonstrate that there existed two discrete types of oracles in ancient Egypt. One type dealt with juridical matters and was referred to as a bi3yt. The other, which will be the main focus of this dissertation, was completely non-juridical in nature; it was rendered to p…
In this thesis I examine the work of two Nigerian authors—Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie—in order to explore consequences and implications of the paucity of genre delineation in African literature. I begin with a close reading of Achebe's Arrow of God, and theorize that he…
Situated along centuries-old global trade routes, North Sumatra has long been a place of global confluence. My dissertation examines the ways in which musical performance among the Toba Batak people, a group living in the island's interior and in its large cities, reflects this …
The first-person Hebrew narrative of the Persian courtier sent to be governor of Judah, the "Nehemiah Memorial" (or NM: Neh 1-2:20; 3:33-7:3; 13:4-31), is a crucial text for understanding how elements within ancient Judaism conceived of their relationship to the Persian Achaemen…
A new Persian literary form, the filmnameh (film book), has emerged in the last few decades. Existing in parallel to filmmaking in Iran, it is unlike a screenplay intended for eventual production ( scenario ). Instead, it is a screenplay, published primarily for reading that has…
This dissertation argues that the reconstruction of gender and literary genres in twentieth-century Iran proceeded together, and proposes that these transformations facilitated one another even as they shared many of the same confusions. Drawing upon semiological notions of soci…
This dissertation examines narrative structures and strategies within texts ("hikayats") of the Malay Muslim Court literary tradition by employing a "close reading" method. Examining these structures reveals that often apparently explicit meaning contradicts both explicit and im…
Despite the many decades that divide Nikolai Gogol's and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's writings, a number of their works are related by striking stylistic and thematic resemblance and a similarity of generic configuration. Their narratives are characterized by a common preoccupation…
My aim in this dissertation is to use the Ottoman discourse of the circle of justice as a wedge in an otherwise crippling debate that presumes a post sixteenth-century decline in the ability of the Ottoman empire to control and direct state affairs. While most scholars in the fi…
In the early 1800s, Rossini's operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing, a sharp decline in popularity drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have mad…