Dissertations / Theses: 'British English'

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Deutschmann, Mats. "Apologising in British English." Doctoral thesis, Umeå University, Modern Languages, 2003. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-43.

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The thesis explores the form, function and sociolinguistic distribution of explicit apologies in the spoken part of the British National Corpus. The sub-corpus used for the study comprises a spoken text mass of about five million words and represents dialogue produced by more than 1700 speakers, acting in a number of different conversational settings. More than 3000 examples of apologising are included in the analysis.

Primarily, the form and function of the apologies are examined in relation to the type of offence leading up to the speech act. Aspects such as the sincerity of the apologies and the use of additional remedial strategies other than explicit apologising are also considered. Variations in the distributions of the different types of apologies found are subsequently investigated for the two independent variables speaker social identity (gender, social class and age) and conversational setting (genre, formality and group size). The effect of the speaker-addressee relationship on the apology rate and the types of apologies produced is also examined.

In this study, the prototypical apology, a speech act used to remedy a real or perceived offence, is only one of a number of uses of the apology form in the corpus. Other common functions of the form include discourse-managing devices such as request cues for repetition and markers of hesitation, as well as disarming devices uttered before expressing disagreement and controversial opinions.

Among the speaker social variables investigated, age and social class are particularly important in affecting apologetic behaviour. Young and middle-class speakers favour the use of the apology form. No substantial gender differences in apologising are apparent in the corpus. I have also been able to show that large conversational groups result in frequent use of the form. Finally, analysis of the effects of the speaker-addressee relationship on the use of the speech act shows that, contrary to expectations based on Brown & Levinson’s theory of politeness, it is the powerful who tend to apologise to the powerless rather than vice versa.

The study implies that formulaic politeness is an important linguistic marker of social class and that its use often involves control of the addressee.

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Lopez, John-David. "The British Romantic reconstruction of Spain." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1692097271&sid=19&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2008.
Vita. Individual works cited are included for each chapter and are noted in the table of contents. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

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Lenart, Jessica. "American or British English? : Attitudes towards English dialects among Swedish pupils." Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Engelska, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-22529.

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The two major varieties of English are American and British English. In Swedish compulsory school both varieties are taught. This essay examines the preferences and attitudes of pupils in 9th grades towards the two varieties, and if there are any gender differences. Previous research has shown that pupils are becoming more and more positive towards American English than they have been in earlier studies. This essay is based on a quantitative study carried out through questionnaires handed-out to 84 9th graders. The results show that the pupils prefer American English in speaking and for educational purposes. However, British English is viewed as more intelligent, professional, beautiful and correct. These findings mostly correspond to previous research but also show some contrasting features such as pupils wanting to speak British English rather than American English.

engelska

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Williamsson, Joy. "How Brits Swear : The use of swearwords in modern British English." Thesis, Mid Sweden University, Mid Sweden University, Faculty of Educational Sciences, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-9164.

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Ashcheulova, T. V. "Intralingual translation of British and American English." Thesis, Sumy State University, 2018. http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/67318.

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Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. The intralingual translation of a word demands a kind of synonymous word for circumlocution. R. Jakobson was one of the first linguists who singled out three forms of translation one of which was intralingual translation. He points out how difficult it is to come up to complete equivalency because the affected codes make certain difficulty in the translation. Even in rewording it is necessary to use combination of code units to interpret the meaning.

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Чекотун, H. В., and О. М. Михальчук. "Linguistic Aspects of American and British English." Thesis, Sumy State University, 2016. http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/46643.

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The theme of our investigation is linguistic aspects of American and British English. British English is considered to be he classical, exemplary variant. It has the status of the national standard of pronunciation in the United Kingdom. BBC adopted RP for the use by its news-readers since 1920. But “the circle of native speakers is extremely narrow – only 3-5% of the Earth’s population”. General American has wider level of usage – approximately 33%. It comprises the majority of American accents from Ohio and to the Pacific coast. Some scholars consider this variant of English to be standard for the USA, others claim that there is no nationwide pronunciation standard. These two accents have a number of differences.

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Snider, Caleb. "Almost an Englishman: Black and British Identities in Three Contemporary British Novels." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28830.

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This project describes the work of three contemporary British novelists as they explore the possibility of self-identifying as black and British in contemporary Britain, despite the prevalence of racist attitudes that hold that these two identities are mutually exclusive. The three novels examined -- The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Brick Lane by Monica Ali -- present black protagonists who self-identify as British. While other characters in the novels either conform to assimilationist or diasporic models of identity, where the subject seeks to expunge all "black" characteristics in favour of conforming to stereotypical "white" cultural norms, or retreat from "white" characteristics into an essentialized version of the values of their "home" countries, Karim, Irie, and Nazneen establish spaces for themselves within British society that allow them to try on different identities. By acknowledging the variability of identity, all three protagonists are able to self-identify as being both black and British.

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Sohl, Gabriella. "Cuisine Linguistics of British and American English : Are the culinary vocabularies of British and American English converging or diverging?" Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för humaniora (HUM), 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-19464.

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This study is intended to unveil whether the culinary vocabulary of British English and American English are likely to converge or diverge in the future, as a way of contributing to understanding the evolution of the English language and its varieties. The topic itself was founded in travels to America which were paired with nearly fifteen years of interaction with British English, leading to understanding that some (food) words come to have different meanings even in similar languages, and possibly also within the same language. Understanding this led to the thesis question: Are the culinary vocabularies of British English and American English likely to converge or diverge? This is an area of study which has seemingly been left untreated so far under the umbrella of Linguistics. As such, the research in this essay focuses on determining a future convergence or divergence between the language varieties from a language historical aspect as well as taking sociolinguistic aspects of language change into account. These aspects are fashion, foreign influence and social need. In addition to the research, a survey involving 15 British and 15 American students between the ages of 18 and 30 which helps determining the current interaction between the two language varieties. Through the research and analysis of these areas of interest, it is found that the culinary vocabularies of the two language varieties are unlikely to converge completely, but are in a state both of constant partial convergence and divergence.

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Ḥajarī, Hilāl. "Oman through British eyes : British travel writing on Oman from 1800 to 1970." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2662/.

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This thesis focuses on the images of Oman in British travel writing from 1800 to 1970. In texts that vary from travel accounts to sailors’ memoirs, complete travelogues, autobiographies, and letters, it looks at British representations of Oman as a place, people, and culture. It argues that these writings are heterogeneous and discontinuous throughout the periods under consideration. Offering diverse voices from British travellers, this thesis challenges Edward Said’s project in Orientalism (1978) which looks to Western discourse on the Middle East homogenisingly as Eurocentric and hostile. Chapter one explores and discusses the current Orientalist debate suggesting alternatives to the dilemma of Orientalism and providing a framework for the arguments in the ensuing chapters. Chapter two outlines the historical Omani-British relations, and examines the travel accounts and memoirs written by several British merchants and sailors who stopped in Muscat and other Omani coastal cities during their route from Britain to India and vice versa in the nineteenth century. Chapter three is concerned with the works of travellers who penetrated the Interior of Oman. James Wellsted’s Travels in Arabia (1838), Samuel Miles’ The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (1919) and other uncollected travel accounts, and Bertram Thomas’s Alarms and Excursions (1932) are investigated in this chapter. Chapter four considers the travellers who explored Dhofar in the southern Oman and the Ruba Al-Khali or the Empty Quarter. Precisely, it is devoted to Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix (1932) and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959). Chapter five looks at the last generation of British travellers who were in Oman from 1950 to 1970 employed either by oil companies or the Sultan Said bin Taimur. It explores Edward Henderson’s Arabian Destiny (1988), David Gwynne-James’s Letters from Oman (2001), and Ian Skeet’s Muscat and Oman (1974). This thesis concludes with final remarks on British travel writing on Oman and recommendations for future studies related to the subject. The gap of knowledge that this thesis undertakes to fill is that most of the texts under discussion have not been studied in any context.

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Huffels, Natalie. "The British trauma novel, 1791-1860." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114340.

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This dissertation argues that the British trauma novel emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, in response to the rise of individualistic conceptions of personal integrity and to the increasing value given to ordinary human life. Moments of intense suffering began at this point to register as shocking and traumatic violations of the boundaries of identity, and early- to mid-nineteenth-century trauma novels explore this cultural opposition between suffering and individuation. In such novels, individual boundaries are frequently imagined in architectural terms, while trauma is cast as a spatial violation of private territory. Although these texts provoke expectations of medical and narrative cures by combining scientific imagery with the marriage plot, they ultimately question the therapeutic teleology of medical science and the educative teleology of the bildungsroman and domestic novel. They instead locate the source of trauma in the bourgeois model of bound subjectivity propagated by both literature and science. This account of early- to mid-nineteenth-century novelistic trauma as a primarily spatial phenomenon differs from modern theories of trauma that focus on distortions in time. It reorients trauma scholarship away from the traumatic memory and towards the relationship between suffering and discrete selfhood. My first chapter argues that Elizabeth Inchbald's 1791 novel A Simple Story replicates and ironizes the eighteenth-century novelistic depiction of suffering as central to human subjectivity. In Chapters 2-4, I focus on nineteenth-century novels in which suffering instead becomes a traumatic violation of selfhood. In Mary Shelley's Matilda, trauma destroys the personal boundaries that block intimacy, so the protagonist keeps her wound open and refuses to heal. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens emphasizes the problematic dimensions of both bound bourgeois identity and inter-subjective working-class selfhood. In this novel, open models of personality engender repetitive violence, while bourgeois privacy creates the traumatic experience of unassimilable pain. In The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins implies that the boundaries protecting the individual self are illusory, as his characters are subjected to constant traumatic violations that negate coherent, self-directing identity. Each of these trauma novels expresses respect for the individual and compassion for human suffering, both of which characterized the valuation of ordinary life that arose at the turn of the nineteenth century. They nonetheless question whether atomistic subjectivity, conceived spatially in terms of rigid borders, is the best protection against psychological pain.
Cette thèse soutient que le roman de trauma britannique a émergé au tournant du XIXe siècle en réponse à la montée des conceptions individualistes de l'intégrité personnelle et à la valeur croissante accordée à la vie humaine ordinaire. Les moments de souffrance intense ont commencé à être compris comme étant des violations choquantes et traumatisantes des frontières de l'identité, et les romans de trauma du début jusqu'au milieu du XIXe siècle contribuent à cette opposition culturelle entre la souffrance et l'individuation. Dans ces romans, les limites individuelles sont souvent imaginées en termes d'architecture et le traumatisme est présenté comme une violation du territoire privé. Bien que ces textes provoquent des attentes de guérison grâce aux traitements médicaux et au remède narratif, qui combinent l'imagerie scientifique avec le récit traditionnel du mariage, la téléologie thérapeutique de la science médicale, ainsi que la téléologie éducative du bildungsroman et du roman domestique, sont remis en cause. Le roman de trauma localise la source du traumatisme dans le modèle bourgeois de subjectivité close propagée dans la littérature et la science. Cette interprétation du traumatisme romanesque du début et du milieu du XIXe siècle comme étant un phénomène essentiellement spatial diffère des théories modernes de traumatisme qui mettent l'accent sur les distorsions dans le temps. Cette lecture éloigne le traumatisme de son association avec l'idée de la mémoire traumatique et le rapproche à la relation entre la souffrance et l'individualité discrète. Mon premier chapitre soutient que le roman d'Elizabeth Inchbald de 1791, A Simple Story, reproduit et ironise la représentation romanesque de la souffrance au XVIIIe siècle, quand elle était soulignée comme un élément central de la subjectivité humaine. Dans le deuxième et le quatrième chapitre, je me concentre sur des romans du XIXe siècle, dans lesquels la souffrance devient au contraire une violation traumatisante de l'individualité. Dans le roman Matilda de Mary Shelley, le trauma détruit les limites personnelles que bloque l'intimité, de sorte que le protagoniste conserve sa blessure ouverte et refuse de guérir. Dans A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens met l'accent à la fois sur les dimensions problématiques de l'identité close de la bourgeoisie et de l'identité intersubjective de la classe ouvrière. Dans ce roman, les modèles ouverts de la personnalité engendrent une violence répétitive, tandis que la vie privée bourgeoise crée l'expérience traumatisante de la douleur inassimilable. Dans The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins suggère que les frontières qui semblent défendre l'individu sont illusoires, car ses personnages sont soumis à des violations traumatiques constantes qui nient l'identité cohérente et autonome. Chacun de ces romans de trauma exprime le respect de l'individu et de la compassion pour la souffrance humaine, ce qui caractérise l'augmentation de la valeur attribuée à la vie ordinaire à la fin du XIXe siècle. Ils soulèvent néanmoins la question de savoir si la subjectivité atomistique, conçue spatialement en termes de frontières rigides, est la meilleure protection contre l'angoisse psychologique.

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Siu, Pui-kwan Rosanna. "Comparing British and American English in the media /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1999. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B21161483.

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Richards, Donna Jean. "Prestige and standard in Canadian English : Prestige and standard in Canadian English :." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/29172.

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A survey of the use of standard and prestige in general descriptions of English, and of Canadian English in particular, reveals terminological confusion caused by the similarity of the two concepts and by cultural differences among the national dialects being discussed. This work argues, however, that these concepts can and should be distinguished. Once working definitions for both terms are formulated, they are tested against data from the Survey of Vancouver English. Vancouver English reveals little or no evidence of prestige, defined as "that variety (or those forms) used by the highest socio-economic group and emulated by others." The absence of a highest socio-economic group sufficiently well established to provide forms for others to emulate may explain this result, since, in Vancouver, social homogeneity seems to complement the geographical homogeneity that typifies Canadian English. While Vancouver English does reveal evidence of standard, defined as "that variety used by the majority of speakers and typified by correctness," the evidence also suggests that the notion of standard may need to be refined. The effect of various social factors on correctness is analyzed in order to provide a more precise notion of what "correctness" reflects, and education is found to contribute significantly to correctness. Furthermore, consideration of the four processes of standardization -- selection, codification, elaboration of function and acceptance -- in Canadian English confirms the importance of education to standardization and suggests not only that a standard exists in Canadian English but also that Canadian English is a standard variety distinct from other varieties of English. Standard is thus redefined to reflect more directly the role of correctness and the centrality of the four processes to standardization. The study concludes with a brief reconsideration of standard and prestige in light of these Canadian findings and suggests directions for further research.
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

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13

Wilson, Sara Curnow. "Unnaturalism: British Literary Naturalism Between the Wars." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2017. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/448805.

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English
Ph.D.
My dissertation explores a turn in British literature back toward naturalism in the late modernist period, a literary move I call unnaturalism to refer to the way it resembles but deviates from the classic naturalist tradition of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, and George Orwell separately play with the form that can best merge literature and politics. The resulting novels—The Years (1937), Murphy (1938), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and Coming Up for Air (1939)—might not all look like naturalism, but they share a concern with determinism and social conditions, a tendency toward extreme external detail, and an engagement with contemporary scientific and medical discourse. Socially and politically engaged, these writers work to expose the mechanics behind the ‘natural’ order and reveal social determinism misrepresented as biological determinism. Rather than work to disprove or deny this way of understanding the world, the novels of my study complicate all singular understandings of human development. In short, these writers recover naturalist conventions in order to expose a functional determinism that is not rooted in biology—is not, in another word, natural—but rather constructed and reconstructed by contemporary discourses. By focusing on the details of the immediate, individual experience of women and economic or national outsiders, unnaturalists seek a more accurate presentation of the deep inequalities of society and the forces that keep them in place. In The Years, Woolf focuses on the way women continue to be limited by social norms despite the women’s rights developments of the early twentieth century (the professions were unbarred in 1919 and the Representation of the People Act of 1928 provided women with the same suffrage terms as men). In Murphy, Beckett gestures toward the growing field of experimental psychology, revealing the determinist assumptions on which the field relies. Rhys reveals similar assumptions in popular male depictions of women in Good Morning, Midnight as she addresses and revises Sigmund Freud’s “Femininity” and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Orwell looks at politics and language itself in Coming Up for Air, turning to sensory description as a way of working within a language tradition that he sees as keeping in place an anachronistic class system.
Temple University--Theses

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Siu, Pui-kwan Rosanna, and 蕭佩君. "Comparing British and American English in the media." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1999. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B21161483.

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Rampton, Michael Benjamin Helyer. "Uses of English in a multilingual British peergroup." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1987. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10019219/.

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This research is innovative in its intensive focus on a multilingual peergroup in Britain. It studies a group of twenty-three boys of Indian, Pakistani, Afro-caribbean and Anglo parentage by means of interviews, questionnaires, participant-observation and radio-microphone recording. It addresses two main issues. The first issue situates the study within quantitative sociolinguistics. Following Le Page, the research asks: how is it possible to examine the social distribution of speech variants given the flexibility and mutability of group affiliation? Two empirical approaches are recommended: network analysis gives leverage on interactional association, and Identtty Structure Analysis assesses psycho-social identifications. The conceptual compatibility of these approaches is carefully stated, and a critique made of closely related sociolinguistics (Milroy and Giles). A demonstration analysis is conducted on two phonological variables, incorporating a critical evaluation of this methodology and suggestions for future use. The second theme concerns a form of secondary Foreigner Talk: what is happening when members of the multilingual peer-group deliberately speak Indian-accented English? Interactional sociolinguistics forms the initial reference-point, and a clarified elaboration of Gumperz's distinction between metaphorical and situational code-switching is developed, capable of addressing issues of social power, growth and marginalisation. Data on this rhetorical Indian English are examined in the light of this model, and then analysis shifts towards more macro perspectives, aligning itself more with the ethnography of speaking. It investigates perceptions of genuine Asian English speakers locally, and proposes that for bilinguals these vary systematically according to domain (local domains having been previously identified) • An outline is given of the impact of migration on the status of English, together with the colonial legacy of racist attitudes towards non-Anglo English in the dominant society. Finally an attempt is made to explicate the peer-group's use of secondary Foreigner Talk within this local and national matrix.

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Buchstaller, Isabelle. "The sociolinguistic constraints on the quotative system : British English and US English compared." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/30382.

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The recent advent and rapid spread of two new vernacular options, go and like, within the (say) variable has attracted a growing body of research in variationist sociolinguists. This thesis examines the synchronic functions of these new quotatives and considers pragmatic, discourse, and social factors. The investigation is based on an analysis of very large corpora of spontaneous spoken British and American English. This cross-variety comparison gives me the opportunity (i) to investigate a case of rapid language change that is happening concurrently with the time of research and (ii) to consider to what extent social and linguistic constraints hold globally. A variationist study of the constraints which govern the quotative system is valuable for the following reasons: By investigating the patterning of the (say) variable as a whole, we gain insights into the rule-governed variability of innovative features and their rival variants (say, tell, think, cry,... ). A look at the entire quotative system reveals the intimate interplay of competing choices within the (say) variable. My project aims at understanding how the system as a whole reacts to the intrusion of newcomer variants. A sharply delimited and hitherto stable set of variants - such as the (say) variable - presents the unique opportunity to investigate the restructuring of all variants as new ones come in. This is especially interesting when we look at competing choices which have the same [-canonical] underlying semantic feature, such as unframed quotes. The data show that far from ousting the unframed or say-variant, like and go add options within the vernacular category. A comparative study on the patterning of non-canonical variants within the quotative pool produces important insights into phenomena such as reallocation, competition within one socio-pragmatic field, as well as interaction of variants within the same variable.

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Ehret, Katharina Luisa. "Analyticity and syntheticity in East African English and British English a register comparison /." [S.l. : s.n.], 2008. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:25-opus-58047.

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Lewis, Lucy Catherine. "British Boethianism 1380-1436." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.325659.

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Östlund, Fredrik. "British vs American English : Pronunciation in the EFL Classroom." Thesis, Karlstad University, Division for Culture and Communication, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-31.

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Today English is a world language; it is spoken by millions both as first and second language almost all over the world. The varieties best known to Swedish pupils are the varieties British and American English. Another variety of English, which is spoken by both native and non-native speakers, is a mixture of British English and American English called Mid-Atlantic English. As long as the English language has been a part of the Swedish curriculum, the leading variety taught has been British English, but lately American English has influenced Swedish teenagers because of its prominent status in media. Since both British English and American English are used in Swedish schools, different attitudes can be perceived among pupils and teachers towards these two varieties. The aim of this paper is to determine if Swedish pupils are using British or American English or if they mix these two varieties. Attitudes and prejudice amongst pupils and their teachers towards these two varieties are looked into as well as whether the pupils speak the variety of English they claim they speak. The question of why the pupils speak the variety they do is also investigated. The results show that most pupils mix British and American English and that American English features predominate in the mix. According to this investigation, teachers and pupils find British English to be a bit “snobbish” while American English can sound a bit “cocky” to them. This investigation concludes that the two major influences on the pupils are their teachers and different kind of media.

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Krzakowski, Caroline. "Aftermath: Foreign Relations and the Postwar British novel." Thesis, McGill University, 2012. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=106245.

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In the aftermath of the Second World War, British writers engaged with the reconfiguration of national identity that resulted from the dissolution of the empire. In many regards, the postwar British novel performs the work of diplomacy. While colonial power held together global networks before the war, an emerging discourse of internationalism urged cooperation after the war. Rebecca West's travelogue about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as well as her reportage on the Nuremberg Trials, laid the groundwork for her incomplete tetralogy, Cousin Rosamund: A Saga of the Century. In both her fiction and non-fiction, West considers questions of British responsibility on the international stage. Similarly, Lawrence Durrell writes about the aftermath of the Second World War by reflecting on the motives and effects of British foreign policy in the Mediterranean. Durrell's travelogue, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, influenced the narrative structure of the Alexandria Quartet. By focalizing Mountolive, the third volume of the Quartet, through the character of a diplomat, the narrative reflects on questions of the private and public responsibilities of ambassadors. Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy, which concerns British nationals in Romania before and during the war, is concerned with global events that provoke mass displacements. Even the British become refugees because of aggressive warfare. While journalists craft their reputations through authorship in the public sphere and diplomats inscribe their perspective into the reports they send to embassies, the spy's works remain hidden from the public gaze. Nonetheless, it fulfills a diplomatic function. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Looking Glass War, John Le Carré shifts novelistic attention to the ways in which spies skirt democratic processes and opt for creating international relationships through secret means. This thesis relies on archival documents and theories of narrative in order to demonstrate how a concern with international cooperation influences postwar preoccupations and narrative structure. Although literary critics often characterize the postwar British novel as being in decline, mid-century novelists, in fact, adapt the genre to changes in the global balance of power.
Les écrivains britanniques d'après-guerre révisent l'identité nationale suite à la dissolution de l'empire. Un discours de coopération internationale remplace les liens globaux maintenus par le colonialisme. Pendant cette période, le roman britannique sert à une fonction diplomatique de plusieurs façons. Le récit de voyage de Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon et ses articles sur les procès de Nuremberg ont influencé sa tétralogie inachevée, Cousin Rosamund: A Saga of the Century. Dans ses romans ainsi que dans ses reportages, West se penche sur la question de responsabilité de la Grande Bretagne dans un climat de diplomatie internationale. De la même manière, Lawrence Durrell écrit à propos des motivations et des effets de la politique étrangère britannique dans la region méditerranéenne. Son récit de voyage, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, a influencé la structure narrative de la série Alexandria Quartet. Le troisième roman dans la série, Mountolive, focalise sur la question des responsabilités privées et publiques à travers la figure du diplomate. La trilogie d'Olivia Manning, Balkan Trilogy, qui raconte l'histoire de personnages britanniques habitant la Roumanie avant et après la guerre, se préoccupe des effets que les catastrophes globales ont sur les réfugiés de guerre. Dans ce roman, même les personnages britanniques deviennent des réfugiés. Pendant que les journalistes forment leur reputation dans la sphère publique et que les diplomates incluent leur opinion des faits implicitement dans les rapports qu'ils envoient à leur ambassades, le travail de l'espion demeure caché du regard public. L'espion contribue cependant au travail diplomatique. Dans ses romans, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold et The Looking Glass War, John Le Carré ré-oriente l'attention sur les moyens par lesquels les espions contournent les procédés démocratiques et choisissent de créer des liens internationaux par des voies secrètes. Cette thèse met en valeur les sources archivales d'auteurs et de départments gouvernementaux, dont elle a recours. En général les critiques littéraires considèrent que le roman britannique d'après-guerre représente un déclin. Toutefois, cette étude démontre que les romanciers de cette époque adaptent leurs romans aux changements du pouvoir politique international.

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Hoyle, Brian. "British art cinema, 1975-2000 : context and practice." Thesis, University of Hull, 2006. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:5698.

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This thesis shall largely concern itself with examining two general aspects of British art cinema between 1975 and 2000; namely, how the British art cinema operates as an art cinema in the context of its 1960s and 1970s European counterparts54 and how the individual filmmaking practices of these British directors both conform to and deviate from classic definitions of art cinema. In this way, this thesis shall demonstrate the ways in which British art cinema can be characterised not only as a belated continuation of classic European art cinema but also a significant development from it. Therefore, it shall examine the work of key British art filmmakers in the context of art cinema history, linking it with earlier movements in European art cinema such as Italian neo-realism and the French Nouvelle Vague, individual forebears such as Resnais, Godard, Pasolini and Wenders, and previous examples of art films in Britain. Furthermore in examining the filmmaking practices of these leading British art cinema directors this thesis will demonstrate British art cinema's stylistic and thematic eclecticism. Taken as a whole, it engages not only with its European counterpart, but with a wide range of influences including classical Hollywood, pop art, structural cinema and music videos as well as more typically British cinematic traditions such as the documentary and social realism. British art film directors have also experimented with new and existing filmmaking technologies and techniques, and made advances in cinematic style and the treatment of subject matter from their European colleagues of the 1960s and 1970s. To investigate these claims, the chapters in this thesis shall not address individual films or filmmakers, but rather, to allow a greater breadth of analysis, will examine their individual attitudes towards factors such as realism and film narrative, and their ties with the cinematic avant-garde and Hollywood as well as European art cinema, that can help to contextualise their films in the traditions of both European art cinema and British cinema itself. Chapter One will provide a brief critical overview of art cinema in Britain before 1975, thereby contextualising contemporary British art cinema's place in British film history, and highlighting the changes in the British film industry that made the growth of British art cinema possible. Several key aspects of British art cinema shall then be examined individually to illustrate the way in which these factors have helped to shape and characterise British art cinema. Chapter Two will analyse the attitudes of British art filmmakers towards the modes of cinematic realism that have perhaps come to dominate British film history. Chapter Three addresses the attitudes of British art filmmakers towards narrative, and will examine the degree to which they have rejected the classical Hollywood narrative in favour of modernist, structuralist, and other less traditional methods of cinematic storytelling. Chapter Four will examine the avant-garde roots of several contemporary British art filmmakers and illustrate the ways in which some of the ideas and techniques of avant-garde filmmaking have carried over into their subsequent work in art-house feature films. Finally, Chapter Five will address the influence of both Hollywood and European art-house styles of filmmaking on British art cinema. It shall also demonstrate how these often contradictory influences have helped to mould the latter's distinctive shape, and highlight the disparity amongst British filmmakers between those who look towards Hollywood for inspiration and financial backing and those who choose to operate in the culturally richer but financially poorer European cinema.

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Johansson, Caroline. "Received Pronunciation, Estuary English and Cockney English: A Phonologic and Sociolinguistic Comparison of Three British English Accents." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-31481.

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Canpolat, Seda. "Hybridity in British Muslim women's writing." Thesis, Kingston University, 2014. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/29994/.

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A key paradigm in postcolonial studies, Homi Bhabha’s notion of cultural hybridity has become the dominant model for understanding migrant identity formation. However, its assumed universality and widespread currency are problematic because this concept is not equally applicable or relevant to all migrants. This dissertation focuses on the representation of cultural hybridity in contemporary British Muslim women’s writing, which is well-suited to pointing out the limitations and biases of Bhabha’s celebratory concept of hybridity. Because of its mostly religious, dark-skinned, female and working-Class protagonists, British Muslim women’s texts expose the secular, white, male and middle-class biases on which Bhabha’s idealised subject is predicated. Accordingly, the major literary texts under scrutiny are Leila Aboulela’s novels The Translator (1999) and Minaret (2005), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Fadia Faqir’s My Name Is Salma (2007). By means of an intersectional approach the thesis identifies, one by one, the biases inherent in Bhabha’s vision of hybridity, particularly as it has been appropriated within the field of postcolonial studies. Each of the four chapters addresses one subject position that the heroines inhabit: that is, religion, gender, race and class. Embedded within wider contemporary debates on religion, gender theory, postracialism and class mobility, each chapter illuminates the ways in which these subject positions complicate British Muslim women’s cultural self-fashioning and our understanding of hybridity. The original contribution of this gendered Islamic critique of hybridity is twofold: first of all, it shows that hybridity is not the only model of migrant identity formation. With reference to the value and belief system of Muslim cultures, the dissertation introduces competing Islamic epistemes of cultural self-fashioning. Secondly, it shows that, where hybridity is the preferred cultural choice of British Muslim women, their various female hybridities are the product of gendered reworkings and appropriations of male-centred postcolonial and Islamic paradigms.

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Travis, Madelyn Judith. "Almost English : Jews and Jewishness in British children's literature." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/2231.

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This thesis examines constructions of Jews and Jewishness in British children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present. It demonstrates that this literature has often sought to determine the place of Jews in Britain, and that this endeavour is linked to attempts to define the English sense of self. This discourse is often politicised, with representations influenced as much by current events and political movements as by educational objectives. The main focus of the thesis is on works published from World War II through 2010, with Chapter One providing a historical context for the later material and offering an overview of key motifs from the eighteenth century to World War II. Works by authors such as Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling are discussed alongside rare texts which have not been examined before. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and heroes and villains reveal developments as well as continuities from earlier periods. The chapter on multiculturalism draws on unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, the late Eva Ibbotson and Ann Jungman. The sometimes competing and conflicting representations in literature which has been influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust, cultural diversity and 9/11 demonstrate that there has been no teleological progression over the centuries from anti-Semitism to acceptance, or from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’. Instead, many of the recurring themes in these texts reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. This tension is present in a substantial body of texts across age ranges, genres and time periods. It demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes which have taken place over two centuries.

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Mapson, Rachel Patricia. "Interpreting linguistic politeness from British Sign Language to English." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.687685.

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This thesis explores the way im/politeness is interpreted from British Sign Language into spoken English. This aspect of interpreting may significantly impact on the dynamics of interpreted interactions, due to differences in the way im/politeness is both produced and received in the varied situations in which interpreters work. The study draws on rapport management theory (Spencer-Oatey 2005, 2008) and the concept of social networks (Watts 2003) to frame the complex and multiple considerations involved. Qualitative data were generated through a series of semi-structured group discussions centred on interpreting im/politeness, involving eight highly experienced professional BSL/English interpreters. Data were analysed thematically to identify how interpreters recognise im/politeness in BSL, the key influences on the way they interpret im/politeness and the interpreting strategies they might employ. To underpin this study, foundational research to explore how politeness is expressed in BSL was conducted, involving interviews with five Deaf participants. Analysis reveals that interpreters' knowledge about politeness in BSL and interpreting politeness is generally tacit and hard to articulate, and suggest the benefits of explicit tuition on the subject. The multiple influences on interpreters' evaluations of im/politeness are dynamic, and coalesce differently in each interpreted interaction. Context emerges as a multi-layered influence that relates to not only the environment but also the characteristics, language use, goals and expectations of the people involved. Interpreters' strategies may involve smoothing their interpretation to better ensure that the interactional goals are met and to manage rapport between clients. The affordance of interpreters' familiarity with the context, and their clients, provides a valuable resource that informs interpreters' decisionmaking and strategy choices; a particular benefit given the temporal pressure of simultaneous interpreting. The study contributes theoretically to im/politeness research and interpreting studies, and has practical value for interpreting professionals, both within initial interpreter training programmes and continuing professional development.

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Ruthnum, Naben. "Haunted artworks: Oscar Wilde and the British ghost story." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=104856.

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This thesis explores Oscar Wilde's influence on the British ghost story at the fin-de-siècle and the early years of the twentieth century. Arguing that Wilde's influence is reflected in the frequently occuring topos of haunted artworks in supernatural fiction, the thesis begins by establishing the significance of the Wildean haunted artwork in relation to Wilde-as-cultural-figure, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Decadence, and the public conception of the male homosexual that would emerge in the wake of the Wilde trials. The succeeding chapters of the thesis examine the manner in which haunted artworks featured in ghost stories by Henry James, M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Robert Hichens, and E.M. Forster respond to Wilde, and the manner in which these stories address anxieties over male same-sex desire.
Cette thèse explore l'influence d'Oscar Wilde sur les récits surnaturels britanniques durant la période de "fin de siècle" et au début du vingtième siècle. Soutenant que l'influence de Wilde est évidente dans le topos de l'oeuvre d'art hanté dans les récits surnaturels, la thèse établit d'abord l'importance et la signification de l'œuvre art hanté en relation avec la représentation sociale de Wilde en tant que personnalité culturelle, le roman Le portrait de Dorian Gray, le mouvement du décadentisme ainsi que la conception publique de l'homosexualité masculine qui émerge dans le sillage des procès de Wilde. Les chapitres suivants de la thèse examinent la façon dont certaines représentations de l'oeuvre d'art hanté retrouvées dans les récits surnaturels de Henry James, M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Robert Hichens et E.M. Forster relèvent de l'influence d'Oscar Wilde – et également la façon dont ces récits abordent les angoisses et inquiétudes liées au désir homosexuel masculin.

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Pearce, Jennifer. "Life in transit : travel narratives of the British governess." Thesis, University of Hull, 2013. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:10122.

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Life in Transit: Travel Narratives of the British Governess argues that on entering the profession of governessing, women embarked on a new, more mobile existence of travel and relocation on a local and global scale. At a time when gentlewomen rarely travelled far without a chaperone, governesses left home and travelled unaccompanied across counties, countries and even continents for the purpose of work. Some relocated to wealthy households in Britain, some toured with families on the Continent, and others voyaged out to the colonies to work for expatriates or members of the Eastern aristocracy. Previously, however, scholars have tended to consider the governess in light of her unusual social status between the middle and working class. Studies of this kind do much to highlight the complexity of the governess’s situation, but by developing new theoretical perspectives which focus on the governess’s mobility, this thesis demonstrates how the impact of travel is fundamental to this. Highlighting the interplay between the governess of fact and fiction, Life in Transit defines the ‘governess travel narrative’ as a literary strand present in the canonical novel, and a sub-genre of women’s travel writing. Beginning with a re-reading of the governess novel, it considers Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) to explore the governess’s journey in England. Moving its focus across the Channel, it then examines how the semi-autobiographical governesses of Anna Brownell Jameson’s Diary of and Ennuyée (1826) and Brontë’s Villette (1853) experience life on the Continent. Crossing the border of fact and fiction into the genre of travel writing, the thesis considers the work of the lesser-known Emmeline Lott and Ellen Chennells, and examines governess travel narratives produced at the height of the British Empire. Finally, it analyses the journeys of Sarah Heckford and Anna Leonowens, who travelling in the 1870s and 80s, reached as far as South Africa and Siam, extending the scope of women’s travel and pushing the boundaries of the governess profession. In this way, Life in Transit re-reads the governess’s plight as both a physical and psychological journey in which she attempts to understand her place in the world. Incorporating theories of travel, space, translation and ‘things’ into a framework through which to examine her experience, it builds on Marxist and feminist approaches to the governess’s position. Allowing for further analysis of the governess’s unusual status, this approach shows how, from within the liminal space of her displacement, the governess experiences her life through spatial above social relations, and provides a unique voice in nineteenth-century Britain’s conception of self and world.

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Algouzi, S. "Discourse markers in Saudi English and British English : a comparative investigation of the use of English discourse markers." Thesis, University of Salford, 2015. http://usir.salford.ac.uk/34008/.

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Based on two corpora, one of Saudi learners and the other of native English speakers, this thesis investigates qualitatively and quantitatively the use of English discourse markers in the speech of advanced Saudi learners of English in the third and fourth years of undergraduate study of English and compares it to the use of discourse markers by native speakers of English. Three of the most frequently occurring discourse markers in the spoken language, namely so, you know and like, are analysed. Qualitatively, the results from the Saudi learners’ corpus show that the three discourse markers under investigation serve a variety of discourse functions. In particular, they show that native speakers of English use so and like more frequently than Saudi learners. You know is used more frequently by Saudis. These results introduce to the research field of discourse markers a new conceptualization of how non-native Saudi English language learners use discourse markers in their speech. Even though the results from the Saudi learners’ corpus show that the three discourse markers are used with a variety of discourse functions, the analysis of the textbooks shows that of the three discourse markers, so is the only one introduced. This makes it difficult to make a strong claim about the connection of the local pedagogy and the use of the discourse markers. Saudi English learners are possibly able to acquire them through their exposure to the media and through their interaction in English with their peers.

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Prescott, Holly. "Rethinking urban space in contemporary British writing." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3011/.

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Rethinking Urban Space in Contemporary British Writing argues that the prose literature of its featured authors offers a unique forum through which to perceive and account for the multifarious agency of urban space. Chapter one examines the limitations of using the Marxist spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, widely adopted by literary scholars, to account for the widespread appearance of abandoned, subterranean and transient spaces in contemporary British writing. The thesis then develops new ways of reading which, unlike Lefebvrean theory, allow such spaces to emerge as affective and narrative agents, shaping narrative form and action. Chapter two focuses upon reading abandoned spaces in the work of Iain Sinclair and Cheshire-born author Nicholas Royle; chapter three examines the agency of the subterranean city-space in narratives by Neil Gaiman, Tobias Hill and Conrad Williams; and chapter four interrogates the agency exerted by the hotel space in contemporary hotel novels by Ali Smith and Monica Ali. Throughout, the materialism of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer is combined with affect theory to stress the narrative and affective agencies achieved by such urban spaces, precisely due to their transcendence of the networks of production and exchange which dominate the capitalist-driven cities of their fictional worlds.

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Valman, Nadia Deborah. "Jews and gender in British literature 1815-1865." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1996. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1564.

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This thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious or racial difference in the Victorian period. The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered, looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of femininity and English national identity. It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and modern national unity. Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women. Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity. Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation, drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery. Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England movement of the 1840s.

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Wozniak, Heather Anne. "Brilliant gloom the contradictions of British gothic drama, 1768-1823 /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1692743101&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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32

Hansson, Emma. "Awareness of Grammatical Differences between British and American English among Young Swedes." Thesis, Halmstad University, Halmstad University, School of Humanities (HUM), 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-4970.

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Background and aim: According to the most recent curriculum for the Swedish upper secondary school1, the students should be able to differentiate between British and American English. Furthermore, they should be able to keep to one of the varieties, as this is a prerequisite of writing correct texts in English. In the present thesis, young Swedes’ awareness of grammatical differences between British and American standard English and which variety they use are investigated. The investigation is conducted by means of a questionnaire. The questionnaire was composed of three parts. The first part consisted of sentences written in English that the informants had to judge as written prevailingly in British or American English. In the second part, the informants had to translate sentences from Swedish to English, and then judge them as British or American. The third part of the questionnaire comprised questions concerned with language use and attitude, as well as questions on basic information such as the informants’ age, education and mother tongue.

Results and conclusions: Nine informants fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The informants’ judgments of the sentences in English suggest that they are not entirely able to differentiate between British and American English. Moreover, their translations of the Swedish sentences indicate that the informants mix British and American English. Furthermore, they are not aware of which variety they use and the majority does not know whether they prefer British or American English. In addition, the findings could support the emergence of Euro-English, a Mid-Atlantic variety.

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Franco, Chelsea E. "The (Wo)Man in the Masque: Cross-Dressing as Disguise in Early Modern English Literature." FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1780.

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Characters’ identities are integral to how audiences relate to them. But what happens when the character suddenly alters his or her outward appearance? Are they still the same person? This thesis seeks to argue that disguise does not alter a character’s true nature, as evidenced by Pyrocles in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the Prince in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure. Both Pyrocles’ suit of Philoclea and the Prince’s suit of Lady Happy are successful because, however subversive they appear at first, they ultimately adhere to societal norms of the time. The relationship between the cross-dressed prince and his love interest in both works only appears to subvert heteronormative expectations for the time, but ultimately adheres to these societal norms once the disguised character’s true identity is revealed to his chosen partner.

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Lawrence, Helen Rachel. "Aspects of English : an examination of aspect within past temporal reference in northern British English." Thesis, University of York, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.341495.

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Doyle, Brian Anthony. "English and Englishness : a cultural history of English studies in British higher education, 1880-1980." Thesis, University of Greenwich, 1986. http://gala.gre.ac.uk/8539/.

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It is argued in this thesis that, contrary to much previous work on the subject, the history of English Studies in higher education is not best understood in terms of the emergence of a mature form of academic activity which has since continued to develop through time on the basis of the unity of its object (lq`English literature') and of its mode of study (lq`literary criticism'). Instead, this history examines the conditions which allowed the initial emergence, specification and delimitation of the new academic discipline of `English Language and Literature', and the sequence of subsequent institutional and discursive modifications and transformations which brought about substantial alterations to the field of study. Through a series of case studies of the English Association, the Newbolt Report, the Review of English Studies, and of the diverse tendencies which have characterised the discipline since the nineteen-forties, it is argued that `English Studies' must be analysed as an entity not having any single or consistent fixed centre. It is further shown that within the variable discursive and institutional articulations which have characterised English Studies as a field of activity, account must be taken of a much wider range of objects and relations than can be encompassed within `literature' and `criticism'; in fact, the discipline is shown to have been just as concerned with, for example, approved modes of communication, and Englishness. The thesis examines the specific historical conditions under which such objects and issues were brought into mutual relation through the establishment of full academic disciplinary status, the installation of an integrated career structure and professional norms, and the development of a distinctive documentary field, set of professional associations, range of pedagogic activities, and mechanism for the selection of students.

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Clarke, Christopher. "Tracing the ethical dimension of postwar British experimental fiction." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2015. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/380677/.

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This thesis examines the treatment of failure in the experimental fiction of Alan Burns, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin in order to reconsider their work’s faltering relationship to postwar British culture. The thesis reassesses the significance of failure in these authors’s experimental fiction by drawing on Ewa Ziarek’s analysis of the affiliation between modernism’s aesthetics of failure and the deconstruction of scepticism. Following Ziarek, it reads failure in the experimental texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin through the lenses of the philosophical revision of scepticism and of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other to argue that we can rethink these novelists’s haunting relationship to postwar British culture by tracing their works’s ethical dimension. This methodology allows for a critical reinterpretation of the relationship between these experimental fiction writers and the postwar British public as it was imagined by a key supporter and funder of their work – the Arts Council of Great Britain. Though the Arts Council’s subsidization of postwar culture enabled the production of these experimental fictions, this thesis suggests that it also inhibited their modes of articulation through its subtle marshalling of the norms and conventions of the public, and thereby contributed to a tendency to misrecognize the significance of failure in these authors’s works. The first chapter introduces Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin by sketching their fleeting formation as a group in the late nineteen-sixties, and their relationship to the Arts Council. The chapter then elaborates on the thesis’s methodology by exploring how a sense of failure also haunted Raymond Williams and Doris Lessing’s attempts to rethink the relationship between culture and community in postwar Britain. The chapters that follow focus in turn on texts by Figes, Johnson, Burns, and Quin in order to outline the relationship of their work to different discursive communities and to devise new ways to read the ethical significance of failure in their experimental fictions. As a whole, the thesis argues that a rereading of failure in the texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin can shed light on the lasting legacy of experimental writing in postwar British culture.

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Girishkumar, Divya. "Diaspora and multiculturalism : British South Asian women's writing." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2014. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/73381/.

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This thesis analyses how the British South Asian diaspora is conceptualized, understood and reflected in a selection of female-authored literary texts which engage with the multicultural policies of the British state from the 1950s to the present. The primary sources include Attia Hosain’s Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Kamala Markandaya’s Possession (1963) and The Nowhere Man (1972), Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman seeks the One (2009) and Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune (2012). I conceive of British multicultural state policies as unfolding in three major phases: Assimilation (1950- 1979), Integration (1980-2001), Social Cohesion/Interculturalism (2001- present). The thesis examines these policy changes and illustrates how these shifts are mirrored in and shape the character of British South Asian women’s writings. In the light of this I argue that British South Asian women writers’ engagement with a sense of exile, dislocation or a ‘teleology of return’ along with a symbolic longing to create imaginary homelands has produced new alliances which exist outside what has been called the national time/space in order ‘to live inside, with a difference’. Through the selected writers’ individual attempts to configure new fictional home spaces, a new architecture for the diasporic imagination is constructed around the poetics of home and the multicultural politics of identity. Such cross-cultural literary interventions exist both within and outside colonial and postcolonial genealogies, reconfiguring the critical geographies by which they have been mostly defined. The first two chapters of the thesis attempt to define the complex configurations of the concept of multiculturalism and its interconnections with the terminology of diaspora. I have adopted a reading strategy tracing the South Asian migration history to Britain and the early literary representations which powerfully illuminate the fragmented imagination of the South Asian diaspora in terms of contemporary theoretical paradigms. The next three chapters analyse literary representations by Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Rosie Dastgir, who highlight and complicate the issues of race, ethnicity and gender in relation to the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multicultural policies. The writers use various strategies that testify to the innate relation between the political ‘real’ and the literary ‘imaginary’ and explain how real life experiences provide fuel to the ‘diasporic imaginary’ and affirm the transnational potency of literature.

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Caines, Andrew Paul. "You talking to me? : zero auxiliary constructions in British English." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609153.

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McKenna, Edoardo. "British Latin in the sub-Roman period : the possibility of direct language contact between British Latin and Old English." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2015. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=235945.

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The present study endeavours to explore the possible survival of British Latin in subRoman Britain. Through a detailed socio-historical analysis it argues that Roman Britain was much more deeply Latinised than hitherto assumed; widespread bilingualism with Latin, and in some cases outright monolingualism in Rome's language, is shown to have extended beyond the army, the upper classes and the cities, and to have in fact become common also in rural districts at least from the 3rd century onwards. To this end, deeply-entrenched beliefs on the nature of British Latin are discussed and dispelled through comparisons with the extant epigraphic evidence; estimates of the geographical distribution and quantitative impact of the alleged Latin speakers are also attempted. On the basis of archaeological evidence this research also undertakes to demonstrate that late 4th-century Germanic settlements may have taken place, in full accordance with Roman authorities, both near the so-called 'Saxon-Shore' fortifications and in the proximity of major settlements throughout the length and breadth of central-eastern Britain. The limited number of Brythonic words which these well-established groups transmitted to the later Anglo-Saxon wave in the 5th century is taken as proof of the essentially minor role which the Celtic tongue played in Roman Lowland Britain. On the strength of the various theories put forward over the last decades on British survival in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, this discussion maintains that a substantial proportion of the natives may have preserved their acquired language, and hypothesises that they may have relocated en masse to western Britain after their victory at Mons Badonicus around AD 500. In the context of this premise, a number of Latin loanwords into Old English are discussed as potentially transmitted without a Brythonic intermediary; the insight previously gathered on British Latin's true characteristics is also employed to examine whether certain English place-names (most notably those in '-cester', those of the 'Crutch/Crich/Churchill' type, and the so-called 'tautological' ones) may not in fact owe something to a Latin substrate.

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Auger, Peter. "British responses to Du Bartas' Semaines, 1584-1641." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:be0f89c2-c2e4-482d-ac8f-e867985ff72e.

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The reception of the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas' Semaines (1578, 1584 et seq.) is an important episode in early modern literary history for understanding relations between Scottish, English and French literature, interactions between contemporary reading and writing practices, and developments in divine poetry. This thesis surveys translations (Part I), allusions and quotations in prose (Part II) and verse imitations (Part III) from the period when English translations of the Semaines were being printed in order to identify historical trends in how readers absorbed and adapted the poems. Early translations show that the Semaines quickly acquired political and diplomatic affiliations, particularly at the Jacobean Scottish Court, which persisted in subsequent decades (Chapter 1). William Scott's treatise The Model of Poesy (c. 1599) and translations indicate how attractive the Semaines' combination of humanist learning and sacred rhetoric was, but the poems' potential appeal was only realized once Josuah Sylvester's Devine Weeks (1605 et seq.) finally made the complete work available in English (Chapter 2). Different communities of readers developed in early modern England and Scotland once this edition became available (Chapter 3), and we can observe how individuals marked, copied out, quoted and appropriated passages from their copies of the poems in ways dependent on textual and authorial circumstances (Chapter 4). The Semaines, both in French and in Sylvester's translation, were used as a stylistic model in late-Elizabethan playtexts and Zachary Boyd's Zions Flowers (Chapter 5), and inspired Jacobean poems that help us to assess Du Bartas' influence on early modern poetry (Chapter 6). The great variety of responses to the Semaines demonstrates new ways that intertextuality was a constituent feature of vernacular religious literature that was being read and written in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.

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Golmann, Malcolm. "Investigating British and American English : Dictionary research and corpus investigation." Thesis, Stockholm University, Department of English, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-8701.

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The aim of this Magister Degree Project has been to investigate if can corpora be used to investigate patterns of lexical distribution and/or borrowing from one variety to another. Another aim has been to investigate how well classification of lexical items as either “British” or “American” supported by evidence from corpora of English.

In order to accomplish these aims sets of lexical items have been examined in two ways: first through dictionary research and “dictionary dating”, and second through the use of such English corpora as the British National Corpus (BNC), the United Kingdom Web Archiving Consortium (ukWaC), and the TIME Corpus of American English. The results of this research suggest that the simplistic labelling of certain items as “American” versus “British” is sometimes misleading, and that corpus investigations on their own, though useful, may not be entirely sufficient in this context.

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Hatipoglu, Ciler. "Culture, gender and politeness : apologies in Turkish and British English." Thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274746.

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Carter, Paul Graham. "Structured variation in British English liquids : the role of resonance." Thesis, University of York, 2002. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14164/.

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Thörnstrand, Åsa. "British or American English? : A survey of some upper secondary schools." Thesis, Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Education, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-1744.

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The aim of this paper is to find out what variety of English pupils in upper secondary schools are using, British English or American English, but also to see if there are any difference between boys and girls and if they are aware of their usage. British English used to be the only variety allowed in school, but now other varieties are taught as well and American English is gaining ground in Swedish schools. According to the curriculum, it is a part of the subject of English in upper secondary schools to study the different varieties and be aware of them. This study took place in Swedish upper secondary schools in the Stockholm area where 108 pupils in university preparing programs translated sentences with words that differ in British and American English, filled in a questionnaire which tested spelling and were also recorded when reading sentences. The survey showed that the tendency among these pupils is that they use American English more than British English in both vocabulary and pronunciation. The study also indicated that many pupils tend to mix their usage between the varieties, especially the girls. It was also seen that boys seem to be more aware of what variety they use.

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Atechi, Samuel Ngwa. "The intelligibility of native and non-native English speech: A comparative analysis of Cameroon English and American and British English." Doctoral thesis, Universitätsbibliothek Chemnitz, 2004. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:swb:ch1-200400880.

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The purpose of this work is to measure the degree of intelligibility of native and non-native English speech as well as analyse the major sources of intelligibility failure when speakers of these varieties of English interact. British and American English (henceforth BrE and AmE) and Cameroon English (hereafter CamE) are used as a case study with focus on segmental and supra segmental features. The study was motivated by a number of concerns, several of which are more prominent: First, it was motivated by the trepidation scholars like Gimson (1965, 1980); Prator (1968); etc. nursed that the unprecedented spread of English across the globe and the emergence of non-native varieties would cause English to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible languages, in the way Romance languages devolved from their Latin ancestor. The second motivation was that previous researchers (Bansal 1969, Tiffen 1974) on intelligibility have often concentrated their efforts on the traditional approach, which sees intelligibility from a one-sided perspective. To them, the non-native varieties of English are deficient and not different varieties from the native varieties. They were seen as substandard, incorrect, and unintelligible and thus needed remediation at all costs. The native varieties were seen as prestigious, correct, intelligible and the sole norm that must be emulated by non-native English speakers. In this way any interaction between a native speaker and a non-native speaker should be characterised by the non-native speaker making all the efforts to be understood as well as to understand the native English-speaking partner. This explains in large part why these researchers concentrated on measuring the intelligibility of non-native speech to native speakers and never vice versa. It was as if it was treasonable to measure the intelligibility of native speech to non-native speakers. Even if some researchers managed to do this, the comments that followed such data still showed that the aim was not to test the intelligibility of native speakers but to find out how efficient the non-native speakers were in understanding the native speaker. Another aim could also be to reinforce the teaching of the native norm, which was seen as correct against non-native features, which were seen as incorrect, to measuring intelligibility. While accepting that these studies reflected the conventional wisdom of the time, this study aims to move the debate forward by looking at intelligibility from a two-sided perspective. It sees communication between speakers of different varieties as a game of give and take, where both participants tune in to make the process successful rather than one participant being obliged to make all the efforts because s/he speaks a new English variety. That explains why we are testing not only the intelligibility of non-native speakers to native speakers but also native speakers to non-native speakers
Gegenstand der vorgelegten Promotionsarbeit ist die Untersuchung der gegenseitigen Verständlichkeit von muttersprachlichem und nicht-muttersprachlichem Englisch. Im besonderen werden die Hauptquellen und Ursachen des Scheiterns von Verständlichkeit in einer empirischen Studie bestimmt, klassifiziert und analysiert. Die Untersuchung wird exemplarisch anhand des Kamerunischen Englisch einerseits und des Britischen und Amerikanischen Englisch anderseits vorgenommen. Motiviert ist diese Arbeit vor allem durch folgende Punkte. Erstens bedarf es der Auseinandersetzung mit den durch eine Reihe von Autoren geäußerten Befürchtungen (z.B. Gimson 1965, 1980 und Prator 1968), daß die Herausbildung und Entwicklung neuer Varianten des Englischen letztlich zu einer Auflösung des Englischen in gegenseitig nicht mehr verständliche Sprachen führt, ein Prozeß, wie er sich historisch bei der Entstehung der romanischen Sprachen aus dem Lateinischen vollzog. Derartige Befürchtungen werden genährt durch die bisher ohnegleichen fortschreitende Verbreitung des Englischen über den gesamten Globus. Hier ergibt sich die dringende Notwendigkeit vergleichender Studien zur gegenseitigen Verständlichkeit zwischen den bestehenden Varianten. Zweitens folgen die meisten zu diesem Thema vorliegenden Untersuchungen im wesentlichen einer traditionellen, überkommenen Grundperspektive: die nicht-muttersprachlichen Varianten des Englischen werden als abweichend bzw. sogar defizitär aus Sicht der muttersprachlichen betrachtet, nicht aber als eigenständige Sprachformen (z.B. Bansal 1969; Tiffen 1974). Dies führt nach Auffassung des Autors zu einer einseitigen Betrachtung und Bewertung. Im besonderen wird in der sprachlichen Interaktion bei einem solchen Zugang die Last zu verstehen und für den Kommunikationspartner verständlich zu sein einseitig dem nicht-muttersprachlichen Sprecher übertragen. Auf diesem Hintergrund untersuchen die vorliegenden Studien anderer Autoren primär die Verständlichkeit nicht-muttersprachlicher Sprachformen für den muttersprachlichen Sprecher, nicht jedoch die umgekehrte Konstellation. Wenn die umgekehrte Perspektive überhaupt berücksichtigt wird, so zeigen die Kommentare, daß nicht die Verständlichkeit muttersprachlicher Sprecher für den Nichtmuttersprachler eigentliches Ziel und Gegenstand der Untersuchung war, sondern vielmehr die Frage, wie effizient sich Nichtmuttersprachler beim Verstehen muttersprachlicher Äußerungen zeigten. Des weiteren stehen diese Studien oft im Kontext des Bestrebens, im institutionalisierten Spracherwerb die muttersprachlichen Normen gegen die nicht-muttersprachlichen Merkmale durchzusetzen, die als nicht korrekt angesehen werden. Diese Positionen, der zugrundeliegende Zugang und die einseitige Ausrichtung bedürfen einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung

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46

Jones, Philip. "Rewriting the Atlantic archipelago : modern British poetry at the coast." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/51877/.

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Despite a so-called ‘oceanic turn’, there has been relatively little attention paid to literary representations of the shoreline as a specific material and cultural site. This thesis examines how modern British poets respond to and represent the coastline in their work, with particular emphasis on notions of place and geographic scale. Whilst looking at the use of the archipelago in recent cultural and literary studies of British and Irish writing, this thesis argues for a more refined and complex sense of the archipelagic, one which responds to the needs and demands of an increasingly global and interconnected world. To better understand this relationship between text and coastal landscape, the project draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, as well as Edward Casey’s investigations into the future of place and Philip E. Steinberg’s reconceptualisation of ocean spaces. In engaging with ideas of place in a newly intense period of globalisation, this thesis contends that a critical desire to focus on disruptions of linear spatial and temporal scales must still negotiate residual notions of bounded communities and national identities. The archipelago emerges both as a site of rupture and interconnection. In attending to these different levels of geographic experience, the thesis also demonstrates how notions of scale must respond to more than spatial distance, becoming attentive to how a variety of emotional and psychological experiences become frayed and disrupted within the shifts between the local, national and planetary. In the poetry of Peter Riley, Wendy Mulford, Robert Hampson, Matt Simpson and Robert Minhinnick, the shore emerges as an ambivalent and fluid terrain but one, nonetheless, in possession of its own social and cultural histories.

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Pruitt, John. "British drama museums : history, heritage, and nation in collections of dramatic literature, 1647-1814 /." View abstract, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3203336.

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48

Green, Helen. "Middlebrow mystics : Henri Bergson and British culture, 1899-1939." Thesis, Northumbria University, 2015. http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/27319/.

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This thesis explores the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy on middlebrow literature between 1899 and 1939. In doing so it engages with the work of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood and John Buchan as well as critics John Mullarkey, Suzanne Guerlac, Michael Vaughan and Michael Kolkman who, over the past three decades, have instigated a significant interdisciplinary revival and reassessment of Bergson’s work. Specifically, this study builds on, yet also extends, the work of literary critics like Paul Douglass, Hillary Fink, Mary Ann Gillies and S.E. Gontarski who since the 1990s have produced extensive studies exploring the impact of Bergson’s philosophy on modernism. While each of these studies confirm the considerable impact Bergson wrought on the culture and literature of this period, each limit their focus to canonical ‘highbrow’ modernist writers. Given the pervasive popularity of Bergson at this juncture, and following the spirit of recent calls in modernist studies for more inclusive, ‘flexible and perspicuous’ interpretations of the period’s literature, this project aims to extend the parameters of existing research to encompass early twentieth century ‘middlebrow’ fiction in the belief that Bergson represents a significant cultural and ideological bridge between these, too often, polarised literary streams. As such, this study expands on the work of scholars like Nicola Humble, Kate Macdonald, Erica Brown and Mary Grover who, to borrow Humble’s term, have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ and reassess critical perceptions of the early twentieth century’s ‘middlebrow’ writing. Following a detailed explanation of Bergson’s philosophy, its place in early twentieth century British culture and its pertinence to literary studies today, I will move on to discuss key works by Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and John Buchan in relation to Bergson’s philosophy, placing particular focus on their more mystical aspects and thematic, structural applications. Such an investigation does not aim to negate the unique contribution Bergson made to inspiring, elucidating and supporting the formal innovations of modernism but hopes to emphasise the fact that his ideas resounded far beyond this context, capturing the attention of an unexpectedly broad spectrum of society in often unexpected, unconventional and as yet, under-explored ways.

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Lai, Chun-yue Eric, and 黎振宇. "Reading Hitler: British newspapers' representation of Nazism, 1930-39." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2004. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B38628673.

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Alftberg, Ann-Kristin. "British or American English? : attitudes, awareness and usage among pupils in a secondary school." Thesis, University of Gävle, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-5545.

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The aim of this study is to find out which variety of English pupils in secondary school use, British or American English, if they are aware of their usage, and if there are differences between girls and boys. British English is normally the variety taught in school, but influences of American English due to exposure of different media are strong and have consequently a great impact on Swedish pupils. This study took place in a secondary school, and 33 pupils in grade 9 participated in the investigation. They filled in a questionnaire which investigated vocabulary, attitudes and awareness, and read a list of words out loud. The study showed that the pupils tend to use American English more than British English, in both vocabulary and pronunciation, and that all of the pupils mixed American and British features. A majority of the pupils had a higher preference for American English, particularly the boys, who also seemed to be more aware of which variety they use, and in general more aware of the differences between British and American English.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'British English'

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