Winnie Verloc's role in "The Secret Agent" has received little initial critical attention. However, this character emerges as Conrad's hero in this novel because she is an exception to what afflicts the other characters: institutionalism. In the first chapter, I discuss the effect of institutions on the characters in the novel as well as on London, and how both the characters and the city lack hope and humanity. Chapter II is an analysis of Winnie's character, concentrating on her philosophy that "life doesn't stand much looking into," and how this view, coupled with her disturbing experience of having looked into the "abyss," makes Winnie heroic in her affirmative existentialism. Chapters III and IV broaden the focus, comparing Winnie to Conrad's other protagonists and to his other female characters.

The Woman in the Box is Smiling is a collection of poems, prose poems, short-short stories, and short stories. The introduction is a personal essay which discusses form as a device used to gain control over subject matter.

This analysis of Tan's first two novels reveals that her female characters suffer from the strains critics like Amy Ling say result from the double paradox of filling the roles of mother or daughter as minority women in a white, male society. Recognizing this double paradox offers Tan's characters, and her readers, the opportunity to resolve the conflicts between mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. Using the theories of psychologist Kathie Carlson helps readers understand how the protagonist of The Kitchen God's Wife resolves similar conflicts with her daughter and her own mother by seeking support from a mythic mother-figure, a Goddess of her own making.

Women's and men's responses regarding perceived speaker sex and the politeness of given utterances were examined through the use of a questionnaire administered to 90 people, 45 men and 45 women. The questionnaire required respondents to rate the politeness of each utterance and label each as being more likely spoken by a man or by a woman. Factors possibly affecting perceptions--such as power, prestige, and the stereotypical conversational structures of both men and women--were addressed through others' research in this area. Additionally, all tested sentences were analyzed in light of linguistic politeness theory regarding on-record and off-record speech. This analysis details each utterance through examining the type of politeness strategy each utterance typifies.

This dissertation is a study of the romantic elements in Bernard Malamud's fiction that can be seen as representing a romantic ideology closely related to the romanticism of William Wordsworth.