Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels set in Ankh-Morpork are similar enough that both can be treated as belonging to the subgenre of comic fantasy. The narratives foreground the fantastic, written to entertain and amuse its readers but also contain societal criticism in the form of satire or parody. This paper compares the unnatural aspects of Gulliver’s Trave

Uppsatsen syftar till att studera konstruktionen av odödlighet i De odödliga genom att undersöka skillnaden mellan hur odödliga gestalter med ett evigt livsspann och hur dödliga gestalter med ett begränsat livsspann framställs. Undersökningen genomförs med hjälp av det grundläggande narratologiska begreppsparet platta och runda gestalter, och utökas därefter med Paul Ricoeurs modell om narrativ idThis thesis aims to study the construction of immortality in Lars Jakobson’s novel The Immortals (De odödliga, 2015) by examining the difference between how immortal and mortal characters are portrayed. Initially the characters of the novel are classified according to E. M. Forster’s narratological division between flat and round characters. It soon becomes evident that the immortal character, wit

Researchers of contemporary literature have noticed a surge in motherhood memoirs and literature that reflects on contemporary motherhood. Kate Zambreno’s three literary works – Book of Mutter (2017), Drifts (2020) and The Light Room (2023) – are examples of contemporary life-writing. In different but prominent and clear ways, these three works acknowledge and contemplate mothering, the act of wri

Using Jacques Lacan’s theories of subjectivity, this dissertation analyses the relationships between the ideal selves and the romantic desires of characters in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondous Life of Oscar Wao. Lacan argues that there is an inherent lack in all human beings, stemming from incompleteness and early helplessness, and emp

This dissertation argues that the incongruity between the narrating I and the narrated I in The Shadow of the Torturer produces a site where myth is made. The novel differs from other works in the canon of science fantasy because its science and fantasy are rarely, if ever, juxtaposed. Instead, I argue that whatever technological understandings the narrator obtains throughout their journey are rep

This thesis investigates the traditional role of women in society through looking at five novels about women by women. To establish what a woman’s traditional place is this thesis compares Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel in the House” to Virginia Woolf’s speech “Professions for Women.” It then goes on to analyze the main women characters of five literary works that demonstrate and counter this

The following master's thesis discusses Virginia Woolf's essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas from contemporary feminist points of views in order to define the nature of Woolf's feminism. The two feminist theorists Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler serve as the bases of the two most widely known branches in feminist theory today, the sexual difference theory on the one hand,

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson depicts a fiery, independent and highly sexual protagonist in the character of Lisbeth Salander. While many readers fail to notice the subtle reference to Lisbeth’s natural red hair, this quality, along with Larsson’s admittance that his inspiration originated from Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, situates Lisbeth in a long tradition of redhea

The fact that Jane Austen composed and edited her novels during two eventful decades in Britain’s history excites an interest to investigate if this has affected the creation of her characters. This thesis explores whether Austen’s heroes develop in accordance with a shift in masculine ideals that can be discerned around the turn of the nineteenth century. The masculine ideal for gentlemen can be

This thesis examines The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz as an example of postmodern fiction. The thesis begins with a background chapter that outlines the central characteristics of postmodern fiction, followed by three chapters that tackle one main postmodern aspect of the novel each: fragmentation, metafiction and intertextuality. First, the novel’s use of fragmentation is

This thesis aims to provide a case study for a critical theory of mythopoetics, via analysis of four ‘Brexit narratives’: The Bad Boys of Brexit by Arron Banks, Unleashing Demons by Craig Oliver, All Out War by Tim Shipman and The Brexit Club by Owen Bennett. My objective is to demonstrate the prevalence of mythopoetics in political and historical discourse, via analysis of four competing politica

This essay examines how the characters experience a sense of place in two of Katherine Mansfield’s modernist short stories, “Prelude” (1918) and “Bliss” (1918). Geographers have during the past century developed and problematized the relation between space, place, and human beings. The concepts of space and place are means for us to better understand our place in the world by relating ourselves to

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a stunningly complex work, blending elements of the traditional haunted house tale, postmodernism, and film analysis with innovative approaches to textuality and to the format of the novel. This thesis explores House of Leaves with regard to many of these elements, presenting a reading which unifies its various modes of discourse by relating them back t

This thesis explores the notion of empathy in David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). Following a discussion of narrative empathy and theory of mind, an analysis of how empathy is portrayed on the diegetic level, i.e. between characters, is performed. Throughout this analysis, it is demonstrated that Wallace’s collection presents a nuanced picture of

This dissertation analyses the representations of Norway, Denmark and Sweden in Scottish travel literature towards the end of the Georgian Era. By comparing two travel accounts, I aim to identify both the authors’ approach to the Nordic countries as well as their reflections on their own national identity. The primary sources used are Henry David Inglis’ A Personal Narrative of a Journey through N

This thesis examines how rituals gamify war in the Hunger Games trilogy. Using a formalist lens, I argue that ritual is a rhythmic, repetitive, and looped form found in both media and real-world conflicts. By comparing the forms within the novel to those in video games and war, I explore the ethical dangers of associating war with game, while also revealing the subversive potential of ritual. The

This thesis explores the ways in which ‘‘Ides of March, 2020’’ (2020) by Didi Jackson, ‘‘Sing a Darkness’’ (2020) by Carl Phillips, and ‘‘Desert Lily’’ (2020) by Rigoberto González engage with concepts of nature and trauma. All three poems reveal poignant elaborations on human position and relationship to nature, and how nature might help the speakers dealing with the traumatic present of the pand

This thesis explores representations of duality across the work of contemporary Native American poets. Through the use of several analytic methods and postcolonial theories, this thesis will analyse representations of language, place, and identity, and argue that they are constructed in the border between Native American and American consciousness. Firstly, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem will be read a

Lotta Lotass Fjärrskrift is a work that makes use of three different media, a 50 meter long teleprinter strip and two filmed versions, distributed in cinemas and published on internet, which are portraying how the strip is made through a teleprinter. The purpose of this study is to investigate by the use of Lars Elleström’s theory of intermediality the different connections between the three diff