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    "So many people going the other way" : an examination of the moral strategy of language usage in five novels by Janet Frame : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1991) Pound, Lynette Ruth
    The title quotation is from Janet Frame's novel, Living in the Maniototo (72). Abbreviations and editions of the five primary sources referred to in the text are as follows: EA The Edge of the Alphabets London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1962. SG Scented Gardens for the Blind. London: The Women's Press Ltd., 1982. SS A State of Siege. London: Sirius, 1989. LM Living in the Maniototo. London: The Women's Press Ltd., 1981. CP The Carpathians. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1988. Some of the ideas developed in the chapter on Living in the Maniototo were first sketched out in a paper on that novel (39.498) written in 1990. I wish to thank my supervisor, Dr William Broughton, for his influence and patient guidance in the preparation of this thesis. Sincere thanks also to my husband, Geoff, and our children Mark and Bronwyn for their enthusiastic support.
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    I'm just a girl : madness, male domination, and female imprisonment in Jane Eyre, The yellow wallpaper, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Faces in the water : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1999) Tokley, Anne-Marie
    Female madness is not always caused by the domination of women. In the texts Jane Eyre, "The Yellow Wallpaper", Wide Sargasso Sea, and Faces in the Water, however, male domination, and female imprisonment do have a relationship to madness. Medical discourse rose to a position of great power in the nineteenth century, as science and reason really began to take over. Suddenly there was a scientific and biological theory behind female inferiority, greatly influencing doctors' perspective of their female patients, and contributing to the enforcement of traditionally female roles. Whilst madness is a real and greatly misunderstood illness, these four texts illustrate that the internalisation and socialisation of medical discourse locked women into roles that, it was believed, they were not capable of escaping.
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    Metafiction in New Zealand from the 1960s to the present day : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2011) Harris, Matthew
    While studies of metafiction have proliferated across America and Europe, the present thesis is the first full-length assessment of its place in the literature of New Zealand. Taking as its point of reference a selection of works from authors Janet Frame, C.K. Stead, Russell Haley, Michael Jackson and Charlotte Randall, this thesis employs a synthesis of contextual and performative frameworks to examine how the internationallyprevalent mode of metafiction has influenced New Zealand fiction since the middle of the 20th century. While metafictional texts have conventionally been thought to undermine notions of realism and sever illusions of representation, this thesis explores ways in which the metafictional mode in New Zealand since the 1960s might be seen to expand and augment realism by depicting individual modes of thought and naturalising unique forms of self-reflection, during what some commentators have seen as a period of cultural ‘inwardness’ following various socio-political shifts in the latter part of 20th century New Zealand.
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    Allegory in the fiction of Janet Frame : a thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1991) Panny, Judith Dell
    This investigation considers some aspects of Janet Frame's fiction that have hitherto remained obscure. The study includes the eleven novels and the extended story "Snowman, Snowman". Answers to questions raised by the texts have been found within the works themselves by examining the significance of reiterated and contrasting motifs, and by exploring the most literal as well as the figurative meanings of the language. The study will disclose the deliberate patterning of Frame's work. It will be found that nine of the innovative and cryptic fictions are allegories. They belong within a genre that has emerged with fresh vigour in the second half of this century. All twelve works include allegorical features. Allegory provides access to much of Frame's irony, to hidden pathos and humour, and to some of the most significant questions raised by her work. By exposing the inhumanity of our age, Frame prompts questioning and reassessment of the goals and values of a materialist culture. Like all writers of allegory, she focuses upon the magic of language as the bearer of truth as well as the vehicle of deception. She shows that language, in transferring culture and custom from generation to generation, is an instrument of immense power; it may create and preserve, or it may instigate destruction.
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    Trauma and recovery in Janet Frame's fiction : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Graduate Studies (Department of English), the University of British Columbia
    (Massey University, 1997) Lawn, Jennifer
    Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression. Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others. I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation, focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text "speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1970) and The Adaptable Man (1965) address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual rgime that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference. The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman)