Department of English

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https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/45

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Browsing Department of English by browse.metadata.advisor "Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-"

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    Fictionalising Charles Dickens : his public and private lives in three Neo-Victorian biofictions
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Troost, Josephine Jay; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 1849 and 1860 Charles Dickens burned all of his correspondence and diaries in an effort to avoid his fiction being read/interpreted through the lens of its author’s life. This thesis analyses three neo-Victorian biofictions: Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) by Gaynor Arnold, Jack Maggs (1997) by Peter Carey, and Wanting (2008) by Richard Flanagan to explore the contradiction between Dickens’s public persona and his private life. This thesis explores his obsessive secrecy and need for control over his life’s narrative, together with his willingness to hurt other people in order to maintain his version of events and preserve his image as the epitome of Victorian middle-class, family-centred morality and caring philanthropy. The three focus texts are linked by their respective depictions of Dickens’s intimate relationships with the different women in his life, by the parallels and differences between these texts and a range of biographies about Dickens, and by the different ways each author has engaged with the ethical considerations inherent in neo-Victorian biofiction’s reimaging of real historical figures from the nineteenth century. This thesis also links Girl in a Blue Dress to Victorian marriage law, Jack Maggs to questions of authorial ethics, stealing stories, and the development of copyright law, and Wanting to Dickens’s own perspectives on the colonial project, as demonstrated by his fiction and journalism.
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    The haunted house/haunted mind as a gothic trope in Mike Flanagan’s The haunting project and source texts : a comparative analysis
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Botes, Christan Nancy; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The haunted head as a haunted house trope, which is the focus of this thesis, has long been a staple of the Gothic genre, appearing in seminal Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The haunted head as a haunted house trope was once again revitalised in renowned horror director Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting Project (2018-2020). Multiple screen adaptations of Gothic haunted-house texts have been created over the last century, often tackling the difficulty of portraying the haunted head as a haunted house trope using visual and auditory language. This study aims to examine how two seminal Gothic haunted-house texts, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), use the trope to explore the social anxieties surrounding female mental illness and the mother figure of their respective periods, as well as how Flanagan re-contextualises those social fears and re-presents the trope in his adaptations of the source texts for his project. In 2018, Flanagan adapted Jackson’s 1959 novel into a ten-episode long series that would form the first instalment of The Haunting Project, a horror anthology for Netflix. James’s famous novel received the same treatment in 2020, wherein Flanagan once again demonstrated his unique style of adaptation and homage to his source texts. This thesis examines the concept of the uncanny and its relationship with the haunted house and how the haunted head as a haunted house trope is utilised as a tool through which the Gothic explores underlying social anxieties surrounding the perceived sanctity of the domestic home, the threat that female mental illness poses to the structure of the household and the effect that patriarchal ideology has upon the feminine-coded space of the home and subsequent enactment of patriarchal oppression through the maternal figure. In my examination of James’s The Turn of the Screw and Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), I will use Sigmund Freud’s theory of “The Uncanny” (1919) to read how both the source text and its adaptation confront the underlying concerns of their respective periods by employing the haunted head as a haunted house trope. I will further use Gaston Bachelard’s theory of the oneiric home (The Poetics of Space 1958) as a lens through which Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Flanagan’s 2018 adaptation of the same name utilise the same trope to explore the social fears of their respective contexts. This study aims to compare how the source texts use the trope to explore the social anxieties of their time with how Flanagan employs the trope in his adaptations as a means to re-present the concerns explored in his source texts to a contemporary audience whilst also addressing how those past anxieties have been translated into the present’s fears.
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    Madness and gender in contemporary diasporic life writing and fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) De Villiers, Stephanie; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I consider the roles that gender, migration, and diaspora play in the portrayal of madness in two contemporary life writing texts and four novels. The selected texts map a variety of diasporic journeys that encompass the variables of migration and emigration: I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying (2019) by Bassey Ikpi, The Icarus Girl (2005) by Helen Oyeyemi and Freshwater (2018) by Akwaeke Emezi all originate from Nigeria; Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir (2018) from Iran; Sorry To Disrupt the Peace (2017) by Patrick Cottrell from South Korea; and Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful (2018) from China. The aim of this dissertation is therefore to examine how the triangular connection of madness, gender, and diaspora in these texts conveys the experiences of mental distress or madness caused by a sense of displacement or alienation that disrupts the lives of the protagonists. My specific interest is in their authors’ employment of metaphor and experiments with language and form to convey the interior worlds of the protagonists with a view to analysing the ways in which new definitions and vocabularies of madness emerge from the lived experience of diaspora portrayed. The key terms of the dissertation — ‘gender’, ‘madness’, and ‘diaspora’ — all raise important questions of definition and disciplinary specificity that emerge from substantive bodies of research and theory, which the dissertation engages within the context of literary criticism. The original contribution of this dissertation thus resides in the theoretical triangular connection of these terms in relation to a literary critical reading of examples of recent diasporic fiction and life writing which have in most cases not yet received extensive critical attention.