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Saunders, R. G. "The sociological significance of British and Soviet poetry, 1945-1985." Thesis, City University London, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.355586.
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Marcarini, Elena. "The distribution of Italian films in the British and American markets 1945-1995." Thesis, University of Reading, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.391354.
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Ferris, Natalie. "'Ludic passage' : abstraction in post-war British literature, 1945-1980." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5b3034e6-3a32-4684-b8a0-eb91cfc756c6.
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This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.
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Glancy, H. Mark. "Hollywood and Britain : the Hollywood 'British' film, 1939-1945." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.333476.
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Whittington, Ian. "Writing the radio war: British literature and the politics of broadcasting, 1939-1945." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=119399.
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The social and political transformations of the Second World War in Britain required a massive coordination of public opinion and effort. "Writing the Radio War: British Literature and the Politics of Broadcasting, 1939-1945" examines the mobilization of British writers through their involvement in radio broadcasting. Drawing on theories of mass communication from the 1930s to the present day, this dissertation argues that the power of radio as a medium of propaganda and national identity-formation lay in its ability to generate an aura of intimacy that encouraged listener identification with the national community. Capitalizing on this intimacy, writers imagined listening publics that were at odds with official projects of national unity. Confronted with the Anglophone fascism of pro-Nazi broadcaster William Joyce, Nancy Mitford and Rebecca West used their writings to neutralize the threat of autochthonous extremism by depicting Joyce as a laughable ideological non-national subject. Even among patriotic Britons, political fractures appeared, as when J.B. Priestley used his radio "Postscripts" to frame debates about postwar British society along socialist lines. In the mixed documentary-dramatic genre of the radio "feature," Louis MacNeice modelled collective gain through collaborative effort in The Stones Cry Out, Alexander Nevsky, and Christopher Columbus. On the Overseas Service, George Orwell and E.M. Forster attempted subtle compromises to keep Indian listeners loyal to the Empire, while Jamaican poet Una Marson repurposed the BBC's networks in order to imagine alternative communities. Marson turned the program Calling the West Indies into an incubator for a vibrant Caribbean literary scene. Collectively, these writers used the wireless to guide British listeners through the social and political changes brought on by the war: having entered the conflict as an imperial nation riven by class and ideology, Britain emerged ready to embark on the massive social experiment of the multicultural postwar welfare state with a renewed sense of possibility and promise.Les transformations sociales et politiques de la deuxième guerre mondiale en Grande-Bretagne ont nécessité une mobilisation énorme d'opinion et d'effort publique. "Writing the radio war: British literature and the politics of broadcasting, 1939-1945" examine la participation des écrivains britanniques dans cette mobilisation au niveau de leur engagement dans la radiodiffusion. Cette thèse utilise diverses théories de communication datant des années 1930 jusqu'au présent pour démontrer la puissance de la radio comme moyen de propagande et de gestion d'identité nationale en raison de sa capacité d'engendrer une semblance d'intimité entre les auditeurs et leur communauté nationale. Les écrivains de cette période ont pris avantage de cette intimité pour imaginer des publiques qui contredisaient les projets officiels d'unification nationale. Face au fascisme anglophone de William Joyce, un propagandiste pronazi, Nancy Mitford et Rebecca West se sont servies de leurs écrits pour rendre neutre la menace d'une extrémisme autochtone en décrivant Joyce comme une aberration idéologique, risible et étranger. Les divisions politiques sont apparues même parmi les Britanniques patriotiques; avec son programme "Postscripts" sur la BBC, J.B. Priestley a poursuit un avenir socialiste pour la Grande Bretagne, ce qui contrevenait les intentions du gouvernement pendant la guerre. Avec ses productions documentaires et dramatiques, incluant The Stones Cry Out, Alexander Nevsky, et Christopher Columbus, Louis MacNeice a modelé un processus de travail collectif au bénéfice du collectif. Dans le Overseas Service du BBC, George Orwell et E.M. Forster tentaient des compromis subtils pour assurer la fidélité des auditeurs indiens à l'Empire Britannique. La poète jamaïquaine Una Marson a profité des réseaux impériaux pour imaginer des communautés autres que celui de l'Empire en transformant le programme Calling the West Indies en incubateur pour une scène littéraire caraïbe dynamique. Ensemble, ces écrivains ont profité de la radiodiffusion pour piloter le public britannique à travers les changements sociopolitiques de la guerre. Ayant rentré dans la guerre une nation impériale fendu par l'idéologie et par les classes sociales, la Grande Bretagne est ressortie avec un esprit de possibilité et se trouvait prêt à embarquer sur la grande expérimentation de l'état social démocratique de caractère multiculturelle.
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Sands-O'Connor, Karen. "The imagination and the imagined nation : British children's fantastic fiction after 1945." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313708.
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Pitfield, Spencer Simpson. "British music for clarinet and piano 1880-1945 : repertory and performance practice." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2000. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/6040/.
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This thesis is a study of British music for clarinet and piano composed between the years 1880 and 1945. The research has established a considerable repertoire of pieces, many of which are completely unknown to clarinettists today. There are two types, sonatas and character pieces. The discussion focuses on a number of substantial works. The sonatas by William Henry Hadow, William Henry Bell, George Frederick Linstead and Roger Fiske have been published (2000) in connection with this study, and critical analyses of the sonatas by Hadow and Fiske are included in the thesis, as are analyses of 'character' pieces by Richard Henry Walthew and Joseph Charles Holbrooke. It is the author's opinion that many of the works discovered demand close attention from contemporary performers. The thesis includes chapters on the British social background and its effect on musical activity; on Brahms's influence; on instruments and on the British playing tradition. The Brahms/Mohifeld relationship was probably the single most important element in establishing a strong clarinet culture in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Native compositions were extremely popular throughout the period and indigenous performers achieved high levels of technical and artistic ability. The research noted a gradual swing away from the 'simple-system' towards the 'Boehm-system'. However, neither system dominated the other and throughout the period many disparate instrumental systems were in use in the British Isles. A chapter on performance practice draws upon evidence from early recordings. Playing before 1900 was regimented and exact in execution. After the turn of the 20th century there was a move towards freer, less restricted playing. This culminated in the outstanding playing of Reginald Kell. His refinement and artistry were unsurpassed by any other native performer of the period.
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Osborne, James Bennett. "Problem families and the welfare state in post-war British literature (1945-75)." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2014. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375740/.
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This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach to consider how so-called ‘problem families’ were conceptualised by the welfare state in post war Britain through an examination of fiction and non-fiction texts. The 1945-75 period has been recognised as the era of the ‘classic welfare state’, during which successive governments made interventions in the British economy to maintain full employment. Preventing wide-scale unemployment was key to classic welfare state ideology, which relied the assumption that workers would make contributions which were equal in value to the benefits they received. Problem families were perceived as either unable or unwilling to participate in this reciprocal relationship due to their failure to achieve or aspire to ‘normal’ levels of productivity and financial independence. In order to gain insight into the manner in which these families were conceptualised by the welfare state, this thesis focuses upon three key areas: psychiatry, housing and family planning. It also draws upon theoretical perspectives offered by Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman to consider how the conceptualisations from each of these served the purposes of state governance and the enforcement of social norms through biopolitical means. Investigating the manner in which the term ‘problem family’ was deployed in the post-war period provides insight into how the welfare state legitimised its attempts to change behaviours closely associated with the poorest members of British society. By shaping policy to encourage the reform of problem family behaviour through biopolitical means, the post-war welfare state played an important governance role by ensuring that as many people as possible existed in a reciprocal relationship with the state.
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Ferguson, Paul A. "Embracing Alienation : Zombies,Rebels and Outsider Culture in British Literature from 1945-1963." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.531690.
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Deutsch, David Henry. "Music Made Meaningful: Social Reforms and Classical Music in British Literature and Culture from 1870 to 1945." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306156820.
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Rogers, Asha. "Officially autonomous : anglophone literary cultures and the state since 1945." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:472d2721-82a6-4f0e-ac48-784802349334.
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This thesis examines the role of the modern democratic state as a sponsor of literature in the English-speaking world between 1945 and 2000. Working with, and modifying, Bourdieu's conception of the literary field, it considers the often paradoxical consequences of the state's shift from censor to guarantor in this period. Granting 'official autonomy' in this way had numerous unexpected and often fraught effects on the writers, readers and institutions that shaped the literary field. To keep this large subject firmly based on available historical evidence, this thesis considers a series of distinct 'moments' of state intervention through detailed case studies of three specific institutions: the international Congress for Cultural Freedom (1960-1968), the Arts Council of Great Britain (1960-1990), and the private examination boards that implemented the National Curriculum in the UK (1989-2000). In each case, it shows how these different but related moments, and the larger diachronic narrative of which they form a part, take place against a backdrop of interlinking historical and socio-political transformations, including the Cold War, decolonisation and multiculturalism. Drawing on evidence in literary and other public archives, the thesis not only brings into view questions about the public status of literature in recent history, it shows how an understanding of the state's role enables us to think differently about the cultural consequences of modern democratic liberalism. The methodological emphasis it places on institutions challenges critical and popular orthodoxies, associated chiefly with the liberal tradition, which conventionally set the overbearingly powerful and monolithic state against the inescapably vulnerable but also courageous individual. The alternative picture that emerges reveals a world in which the actions of various individuals can be understood partly via the institutional roles they perform, and institutions operate as sites that negotiate competing ideas of literature and literariness, and implement state power in variegated, diffuse and contested ways. Each of the case studies provides a different, though comparable, perspective on this larger picture. As such, the thesis opens up a nuanced way of analysing the interventions of writers, critics and reading communities, while also offering a differentiated approach to understanding the state and its evolution.
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Feigel, Lara. "Reading between the frames : the influence of cinematic technique on politically engaged British literature, 1930-1945." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.486980.
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Hill, Geoffrey Burt. "'A breeding-ground of authors' : South East Asia in British fiction, 1945-1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708370.
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Anderton, Marja Arendina Louise. "The power to destroy false images : eight British women writers and society 1945-1968." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1994. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4409/.
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This dissertation aims to oppose the assumption underlying many studies that the immediate post-war period was a `silent' time in which there were no signs that women were not generally content to follow the ideal of femininity, and that the feminist movement started suddenly in 1968. This thesis focuses on the dissenting voices which could be heard both in society and literature before 1968. Part I deals with the position of women in society between 1945 and 1968. It concentrates particularly on women at work and in the family. The fact that more married women than ever before entered the labour market after World War II contradicts the idea that British women in the '50s were mostly housewives. Furthermore, in spite of the apparent coming into existence of the so-called `affluent society', women had many reasons to feel dissatisfied. Women were mainly found in low-status and low-paid jobs, and in the family women had very little power, especially sexually and financially. This part of the thesis also deals with women in society who were expressing the discontent they felt. First of all, there were middle-class journalists (e.g. Stott) and sociologists (e.g. Gavron, Klein) who were registering women's dissatisfaction in their publications. Secondly, an outlet for grievances for women was formed by The Guardian's women's page (especially the letters section) which discussed many controversial issues. Part II deals with another group of middle-class women who turned to the problematic position of women in society in their publications, eight British women novelists who started writing in this period. This part discusses the lives of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Penelope Mortimer, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Edna O'Brien and Beryl Bainbridge, with particular reference to their emergence as writers. The biographical section refers to interviews as well as to letters to the author. The final part of the dissertation discusses several novels by each writer. There are three main themes which recur again and again in these novels, the search for an identity (a female form of the Bildungsroman is very popular), the restrictive influence of the family on the heroines, and the importance of work for the self-esteem of many of the female characters.
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Clemens, Gabriele. "Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945-1949 : Literatur, Film, Musik und Theater /." Stuttgart : F. Steiner, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb370585898.
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Cherry, Peter James. "British Muslim masculinities in transcultural literature and film (1985-2012)." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22995.
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This thesis examines how novels and films by British writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage address the reshaping of masculinity through migration and interaction with other cultures within the UK. Drawing on a comparative critical framework that combines approaches from feminist, gender and masculinity studies, postcolonial, migration and transcultural studies, Islamic studies and literary and film theory, this thesis engages with five novels and four films that were written or released between 1985 and 2012, by British writers and filmmakers who were either born in a Muslim-majority nation or born to parents originating from a Muslim-majority country and who use their fictions to explore the presence and practices of Muslim cultures and communities in contemporary Britain. Through close analysis of work by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Sally El Hosaini, Ayub Khan-Din, Hanif Kureishi and Robin Yassin-Kassab, this thesis scrutinises how migrant and subsequent generations of postmigrant male protagonists construct their masculinity and how their conceptions of gender identity and performance are ‘translated’ into a British context amidst this century’s climate of Islamophobia and anti-migrant rhetoric, following events such as the Rushdie Affair, 9/11 and 7/7. In doing so, this thesis contends that through transnational movement and settlement conceptions of ‘Muslimness’, ‘Britishness’, and those of masculinity, are thrown into sharp relief and exposed as unstable and contingent constructs. By foregrounding the transcultural aesthetics and themes of this literary and cinematic corpus, however, I argue that this body of cultural production interrogates similarities and differences between the cultures they are positioned across. I use this transcultural approach to focus on how these texts depict father and son relations, religion, urban marginality and sexuality, and how through these foci, these novels creatively imagine new forms of masculinity that are forged through cultural contact, conflict and entanglement.
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Assinder, Semele Jessica Alice. "Greece in British women's writing, 1866-1915." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.608061.
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Andrew, Lucy. "The British boy detective : origins, forms, functions, 1865-1940." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2014. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/62426/.
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This thesis explores the early development of the British boy detective in ‘penny dreadfuls’ and story papers from 1865-1940 and considers how the construction of this figure addresses contemporary social anxieties surrounding boyhood and performs an ideological function for boy readers. Chapter 1 focuses on how the representation of the boy detective in the ‘penny-dreadful’ The Boy Detective (1865-6) responds to anxieties about juvenile delinquency, particularly the perceived corrupting influence of ‘penny dreadfuls’ upon boy readers. Chapter 2 examines the first appearances of the adult professional detective’s boy assistant in the Harmsworths’ boys’ story papers of the 1890s and early twentieth century. Here, the representation of the detective’s assistant is linked to the emergence of anxieties surrounding adolescence. Chapter 3 explores the centralisation of the professional boy detective, as either assistant or independent investigator, in story-paper narratives in the first decade of the twentieth century. These texts are considered in relation to anxieties about the impending threat of war and boys’ future role in the defence of a declining British Empire. Chapter 4 explores the increasing restrictions placed upon the professional boy detective in the post-1910 story-paper narratives in which he is largely confined to the assistant role. I make connections between this subsidiary position and the supporting defence roles to which real-life boys were confined in preparation for and during the First World War. Chapter 5 focuses upon the fictional boy detective’s relocation from a professional, adult arena to an amateur, child-centric environment in schoolboy detective narratives. This transition is considered in relation to childhood’s increasing distinction from adulthood in the early twentieth century. Overall, the thesis considers the boy detective as a dual figure, acting simultaneously as a threat in need of containment and a boyhood role model and thus utilised as both an expression of and antidote to the contemporary adult anxieties about boyhood.
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Procter, James Richard. "Dwelling places : the cultural politics of black British writing, 1948-1998." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.251989.
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Snelson, John Mainwaring. "The West End musical 1947-54 : British identity and the 'American invasion'." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.288420.
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Taylor-Brown, Emilie. "Miasmas, mosquitoes, and microscopes : parasitology and the British literary imagination, 1885-1935." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/84851/.
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This thesis explores the complex and multi-form exchanges between parasitology and the British literary imagination in the period 1885 to 1935. This fifty-year period, which takes the institutionalisation of parasitology as its mid-point, was a significant cultural moment, witnessing the diversification of medicine into research specialisms. In the case of parasitology, this increasing specialisation was accompanied, seemingly paradoxically, by what we would now call interdisciplinarity. Parasitologists consciously engaged with literary myths of nationhood in order to garner widespread support for their sub-field, and help communicate their research. Meanwhile they provided the public with significant motifs for exploring a variety of social, cultural, and political relationships. Literary authors’ engagement with disciplinary politics provided them with a means of interrogating British national identity and critiquing or supporting British imperial rule. The dialogues between parasitology and the British literary imagination in this period ultimately articulated anxieties concerning “self” and “other” at the biological, psychological, and ideological levels. As I will argue, the parasite-host relationship became a significant framework for understanding identity, and consequently was deeply embedded in, and inseparable from, understandings of what it meant to be British in an increasingly global world. In order to access the dialogues between parasitology and the British literary imagination, I will use a variety of sources, including: literary fiction, poetry, satire, newspaper articles, personal correspondence between doctors, parasitologists’ research diaries, and scientific publications. In analysing this dialogue, which might be taken as a case study of wider literature-science relationships in this time period, we gain a greater understanding of the politics of narrating science. Building on previous work in the burgeoning field of literature and science studies, this thesis will seek to explore the utility of interdisciplinary approaches to research and communication, investigate the processes behind the public understanding of science, and interrogate the cultural and historical framing of science.
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Padamsee, Alexander. "Spectacles of dispossession : representations of Indian Muslims in British colonial discourse, 1857-1905." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2003. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1803.
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This thesis analyses some of the changing features by which Indian Muslims were identified in British colonialist discourse between the outbreak of revolt in 1857 and the partition of Bengal in 1905. Most of the texts examined emanate out of the relatively circumscribed Anglo-Indian official community, and range from personal correspondence, to 'Mutiny' memoirs, travel guides, and socio-political essays. The argument takes as its starting point David Washbrook's description of the selfconstitution of the Raj as a centralised, secular and neutral state arbitrating the claims of competing ascriptive racial and ethnic communities. Drawing on recent Lacanian analyses of the formation and maintenance of ideologies, as well as on the sociological schema of Zygmant Bauman, the thesis argues that in the post-1857 period the preservation of this official identity became dangerously reliant on a discourse of power centred on representations of Indian Muslims. Chapter One reads the stereotype of the Indian Muslim in 1905 for its most salient features - debased foreign origins, religious incontinence, isolation within Indian society, and secret ambitions towards temporal power. It then traces them back to their first marked appearance in colonial discourse in 1857. Chapter Two begins with a reassessment of the historiography with regard to Muslim 'conspiracy' during the revolt, as well as a reconsideration of official praxis towards Indian Muslims in the half-century before its outbreak. Proceeding to a detailed analysis of' Mutiny' texts, it concludes that the unprecedented, widespread British misperception of 'conspiracy' stemmed in part from an irrational colonialist attempt to re-possess their own fractured secular ideology through tropes of Christian persecution. Chapter Three compares the highly ambivalent post-'Mutiny' representations of Indo-Muslim 'fanaticism' that resulted with a secularised late eighteenth-century discourse on Mughal figures of authority. It argues that the strikingly similar discourses of alienation and lack of self-command structuring both forms of representation derived from crises in the colonialist inability to command their own self-presentation as rulers within the Indian environment. In the later discourse, in particular, these instabilities issued in a disastrous process of representational stigmatisation and segregation.
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McDaniel, Jamie Lynn. "Trespassing Women: Representations of Property and Identity in British Women’s Writing 1925 – 2005." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1278650822.
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Sullivan, Melissa. "Revisioning middlebrow culture Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, and the politics of taste, 1894-1941 /." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file, 317 p, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1601514451&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=8331&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Mercurio, Jeremiah Romano. "Fantasy as a mode in British and Irish literary decadence, 1885–1925." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1964.
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This Ph. D. thesis investigates the use of fantasy by British and Irish 'Decadent' authors and illustrators, including Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, 'Vernon Lee' (Violet Paget), Ernest Dowson, and Charles Ricketts. Furthermore, this study demonstrates why fantasy was an apposite form for literary Decadence, which is defined in this thesis as a supra-generic mode characterized by its anti-mimetic impulse, its view of language as autonomous and artificial, its frequent use of parody and pastiche, and its transgression of boundaries between art forms. Literary Decadence in the United Kingdom derives its view of autonomous language from Anglo-German Romantic philology and literature, consequently being distinguished from French Decadence by its resistance to realism and Naturalism, which assume language's power to signify the 'real world'. Understanding language to be inorganic, Decadent writers blithely countermand notions of linguistic fitness and employ devices such as catachresis, paradox, and tautology, which in turn emphasize the self-referentiality of Decadent texts. Fantasy furthers the Decadent argument about language because works of fantasy bear no specific relationship to 'reality'; they can express anything evocable within language, as J.R.R. Tolkien demonstrates with his example of "the green sun" (a phrase that can exist independent of the sun's actually being green). The thesis argues that fantasy's usefulness in underscoring arguments about linguistic autonomy explains its widespread presence in Decadent prose and visual art, especially in genres that had become associated with realism and Naturalism, such as the novel (Chapter 1), the short story (Chapter 3), drama (Chapter 4), and textual illustration (Chapter 2). The thesis also analyzes Decadents' use of a wholly non-realistic genre, the fairy tale (see Chapter 5), in order to delineate the consequences of their use of fantasy for the construction of character and gender within their texts.
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Hayward, Emma. "From London to New York : peripatetic narratives and the urban imaginary in British and American literature from 1985-present." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2015. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/2028779/.
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The thesis focuses on literary-engagements with London and New York from 1985- present. It brings together a diverse range of literary texts and theoretical discourses on postmodernity, post-colonialism, mass culture and difference, and identifies a variety of cognate literary approaches adopted by contemporary authors in response to the more undesirable facets of late-capitalism. Postmodernity is often conceptualised negatively, critiqued for the way in which it diminishes subjectivity, authenticity, meaning, cultural and ideological efficacy, and historical continuity. The thesis challenges this theoretical perspective by showing how contemporary writing on London and New York is characterised by a recuperative agenda that seeks to ascribe these very qualities to everyday urban experience as it is lived and felt under the conditions of postmodernity. In particular, it considers the significant role played by formal experimentation, and the ways in which postmodern literary techniques, such as intertextuality and hybridity, work ironically to recover a high- modernist concern with meaning, authenticity, cultural efficacy and individual agency. The thesis identifies a millennial shift towards a ‘post-postmodern’ or ‘metamodern’ optimism and enthusiasm, and locates contemporary writing on urban space within this new context.
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Blayac, Ariane. "Séparation et appartenance dans l'oeuvre de Henry Green." Thesis, Paris 3, 2011. http://www.theses.fr/2011PA030167.
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Dans l’univers fictionnel, à la fois sombre et comique, de Henry Green, les personnages sont isolés, coupés des autres et d’eux-mêmes, enfermés dans leur propre corps et leur conscience, mais aspirent malgré tout à fonder une famille et appartenir à une communauté. De son côté, la communauté existe essentiellement sous forme de fantasme ou dans les discours publics, mais son pouvoir normatif n’en reste pas moins dangereux, car le groupe détruit l’individualité et exige que l’on se conforme à ses règles, que l’on adopte ses valeurs et que l’on accomplisse ses rituels dépourvus, chez Green, de sens. Pendant la Deuxième guerre mondiale, moment où Green écrit ses romans les plus aboutis, l’impératif d’appartenir à une communauté nationale réduit au silence les voix personnelles et substitue à l’expérience privée un récit collectif issu des presses de la propagande. Entrer dans l’histoire revient à se renier en tant qu’individu, à se taire : la destruction de l’intimité, le silence, l’oubli menacent les personnages greeniens. Le conflit entre une volonté de s’affirmer en tant qu’individu et un désir de se fondre dans la masse se reflète dans l’esthétique atypique de Green, qui se nourrit des topoi littéraires de son époque tout en se démarquant du traitement qu’en font ses contemporains. L’écriture se fait intertextuelle, plurielle, idiosyncratique, alors que le romancier mêle accents régionaux et langue archaïque, emprunte des idiomes à des langues vernaculaires et littéraires, divisée et fragmentée, lorsqu’il décrit les effets de la guerre sur la psychéIn the dark and comical fictional world of Henry Green, the characters are isolated, cut off from themselves and from others, locked into their own body and mind, but they nevertheless yearn to build a family and to belong to a community. As far as communities are concerned, they exist solely in the characters’ fantasms or in public discourses, but their normative power remains dangerous: groups destroy individuality and demand that members conform to collective rules and adopt the same values. They require that one participate in rituals that are, in Green’s novels, deprived of any meaning. During the Second World War, when Green writes his best novels, belonging to a national community becomes compulsory. This silences personal voices and substitutes a collective narration written by British propaganda to private experience. Entering history means that individuals should not contradict the official version and have to deny themselves: the destruction of intimacy, silence and forgetting therefore threaten Green’s characters. The conflict between a will to establish oneself as an individual and the desire to melt into masses is reflected in Green’s atypical esthetic, which feeds on literary commonplaces of the times while setting itself apart from the meanings normally attached to them. The writing is characterized by intertextuality. It is plural, idiosyncratic, as the author mingles regional accents and an archaic speech, and borrows idioms from vernacular and literary languages, divided and fragmented, when he records the effects of the war on the psyche
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Clayton, Jeffrey Scott Keirstead Christopher M. "Discourses of race and disease in British and American travel writing about the South Seas 1870-1915." Auburn, Ala., 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10415/1996.
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Byrne, Aoife. "Modern homes? : an analysis of Irish and British women's literary constructions of domestic space, 1929-1946." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/268014.
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Cosy aphorisms such as “home is where the heart is” have always suggested a universal understanding of home. But home is a subjective concept that defies any homogenous designation. If, as Walter Benjamin told us, a consequence of modernity is the necessary sequestration of ‘bourgeois’ domestic spaces from an increasingly ‘modern’ outside world, such a spatial binarism is notably absent in the works of Irish and British women authors from 1929-1946. On the contrary, in these texts, domestic space has multiple functions, not least of which is its usefulness in exploring concepts of modernity, including the consequences of industrial scale warfare on civilian life. During this time, women authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Nancy Mitford, Evadne Price and Daphne du Maurier respond to the ways in which the ideas of home were in a continuous state of redefinition. They do this for multiple reasons. Factors changing these authors’ perceptions of d0mestic space vary from material, aesthetic, external, broadly philosophical and political. These issues are also sometimes deeply violent, as is seen, for instance, in the burnings of the houses of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency in the Irish War of Independence, and the destruction of houses by bombing in the London Blitz. This project analyses Irish and British domestic spaces as women authors imagine them after the formal segregation of the two countries with the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922). As both countries move in different political and cultural directions, so too, these authors perceive, do the meanings of home. This changes the ways in which authors construct both the conceptual ideas of home and the material realities of houses in both countries. Congruently, this cross-cultural analysis complicates our understanding of these women authors’ responses to changing meanings of home, women’s issues, and the experience of modernity in the period.
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Rogers, Ted. "Evil and Englishness representations of traumatic violence and national identity in the works of the Inklings, 1937-1954 /." restricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-08062007-153431/.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Title from file title page. Ian C. Fletcher, committee chair; Jared Poley, committee member. Electronic text (136 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Nov. 5, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-136).
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Paludan, Kajsa. "Lisbeth Salander Lost In Translation - An Exploration of the English Version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2014. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1935.
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This thesis sets out to explore the cultural differences between Sweden and the United States by examining the substantial changes made to Men Who Hate Women, including the change in the book’s title in English to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. My thesis focuses in particular on changes in the depiction of the female protagonist: Lisbeth Salander. Unfortunately we do not have access to translator Steven T. Murray’s original translation, though we know that the English publisher and rights holder Christopher MacLehose chose to enhance Larsson’s work in order to make the novel more interesting for English-speaking readers, which resulted in Murray translating under the pseudonym Reg Keeland as he did not agree to the translation made by MacLehose and Knopf. Furthermore, this thesis touches on the ethics of translation, and will likewise argue the importance of facilitating a dialog concerning misogyny and rape culture.
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Ortega, Laura M. "The Commodification of Queer Virgins in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Keats." FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1905.
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The purpose of this thesis was to explore selected works from William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats, in order to expose textual instances of feminist thought. This analysis was aided with feminist theorists falling under the main strains of queer theory, materialism, and gender performance. Specifically, this thesis focused on the ways in which women, particularly virgin daughters, were viewed as property by their male kin. It also looked at how these women engaged in various symbolic masquerades and/or actual cross-dressing as a response to the aforementioned phenomenon. Finally, the thesis exposed how these masquerades can be construed as a queering of identity—manifested through reversals of power and rejection of patriarchal institutions like marriage.
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Guerin, Caroline. "Sara Maitland and Michele Roberts : religion and spirituality in contemporary British women's fiction /." Title page, table of contents and abstract only, 1995. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phg9321.pdf.
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Newnum, Anna Kristina Stenson. "The poetry of religion and the prose of life: from evangelicalism to immanence in British women's writing, 1835-1925." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5819.
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The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women's Writing, 1835-1925&" traces a tradition of religious women poets and women's poetic communities engaged in generic and theological exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentieth-century women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization during the nineteenth century.
These writers, including contributors to The Christian Lady's Magazine, Grace Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women's private lives. Just as the women in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to women's suffrage, to pacifism.
This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to illustrate God's equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.
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Davies, Ben. "Exceptional intercourse : sex, time and space in contemporary novels by male British and American writers." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2582.
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This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.
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Wiest, Jessica Caroline Alder. "Alexander Korda and his "Foreignized Translation" of The Thief of Bagdad (1940)." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2010. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2545.
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Adaptation studies has recently turned an eye towards translation theory for valuable discussion on the role of movie makers as translators. Such discussion notes the difficulties inherent in adapting a medium such as a book, a play, or even a theme park ride into film. These difficulties have interesting parallels to the translation of one language into another. Translation theory, in fact, can shed important light on the adaptation process. Intrinsic to translation theory is the dichotomy between domesticating translation and foreignizing translation, the two major styles of translation. Translation scholar Lawrence Venuti, the author of these two terms, argues that while the former is an "ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiving cultural values, bringing the author back home," the latter is "an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad" (15). Venuti suggests that foreignizing translations, ones that maintain distinct cultural difference within the translated target text, are more desirable and ultimately commit less violence on the source text and language. This paper analyzes the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad, a British remake of a 1924 Hollywood film by the same name, for its elements of foreignizing translation. Producer Alexander Korda, acting as a kind of translator, made this film during the height of the British national film movement. Supported by this movement, and inspired by his own personal vendetta against Hollywood, Korda took an American blockbuster and re-vised it with distinctly British thematic elements. Because his ultimate audience was an American one, however, I argue that his film took an American source text, The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and foreignized it, hoping, in the process, to establish British cinema as a major player in the international film world.
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Cotter, Cynthia Ann. "Buffoons and bullies: James Joyce's priests in "Stephen Hero" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", a study of revision." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1991. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/731.
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Pereira, Ismael Bernardo. "Connections between the gothic and science fiction in Frankenstein, Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the island of Dr. Moreau." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/179441.
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A presente dissertação tem como objetivo estabelecer um diálogo entre três obras da literatura britânica do século XIX: o romance Frankenstein (1818), da autora Mary W. Shelley; a novela O Médico e o Monstro (1886), de autoria de Robert Louis Stevenson; e o romance A Ilha do Dr. Moreau (1896), de H. G. Wells. Tal comparação será feita com base nas convenções advindas dos gêneros Gótico e Ficção científica, presentes nas obras. Como principal alicerce teórico para a definição de gêneros entendem-se as considerações de Tzvetan Todorov, que defende que os gêneros são inevitáveis como horizonte de interpretação, além de serem entidades em constante mudança numa cadeia de influências através da qual novos gêneros são criados a partir de outros pré-existentes. O presente trabalho parte desse pressuposto para determinar de que maneira os gêneros Gótico e Ficção científica estão presentes nas obras, observando como os traços do Gótico, ao se adaptarem através do tempo, deram lugar a convenções ainda semelhantes, mas que já apontavam para o que posteriormente seria considerado um novo gênero literário. Primeiramente, são feitas considerações sobre conceitos de gênero textual/literário através do tempo, as quais mostram o quanto seu estudo permaneceu constante. A seguir são definidas certas convenções dos dois gêneros, assim como o modo como dialogam entre si. A segunda parte do trabalho analisa as duas primeiras obras em ordem cronológica, Frankenstein e O Médico e o Monstro, de maneira a perceber a predominância de convenções do Gótico – especialmente relacionadas ao conflito interior dos personagens, como o "duplo" – ao mesmo tempo que a emergência de temas da ciência, como os de criador/criatura e ambição científica. O último capítulo verifica como a primeira fase da Ficção científica de H. G. Wells em geral e A Ilha do Dr. Moreau em particular resgatam convenções dos dois gêneros supracitados, ao mesmo tempo servindo como consolidador das convenções do último. Conclui-se, portanto, que houve uma evolução que possibilitou a emergência de um novo gênero ligado ao contexto histórico das obras, o que legitima a consideração dos gêneros como entidades mais livres e não restritivas, que podem estar presentes em diversas obras ao mesmo tempo e ampliar seu horizonte de interpretação.This thesis establishes a dialogue among three books from 19th century British literature: the novel Frankenstein (1818), by M. W. Shelley; the novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson; and the novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), by H. G. Wells. This comparison is made based on the specific Gothic and Science fiction conventions present in the books. The main theoretical support for the definition of genres employed here comes from Tzvetan Todorov. The author argues that genres are inevitable as horizons of interpretation, entities in constant change which tend to create new genres from pre-existent ones, in a chain of influences. This thesis considers this supposition to determine how Gothic and Science fiction make themselves present in the works analyzed, in a way that Gothic traits, being adapted through time, give way to similar but yet innovative conventions, which subsequently would be considered a new literary genre. Primarily, considerations concerning the concept of genres through history are made, all of which show how this study was kept constant. Hereafter, certain conventions regarding both genres are defined, as well as the manner they dialogue amongst themselves. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to the analysis of Frankenstein and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and establishes the predominance of Gothic conventions – especially the ones related to the inner conflict of the characters, such as the "double" –, while considering the emergence of scientific themes, such as the creator/creature relationship and scientific ambition. The last section verifies how the first cycle of H. G. Wells' Science fiction in a broad sense, and The Island of Dr. Moreau in a strict sense, reemploy conventions of both genres, serving to consolidate the latter. Therefore, it is concluded that there was an evolution which enabled the emergence of a new genre, considering the historical contexts and the books analyzed. This consideration justifies genres as wide-ranging, non-restrictive entities, which may be present in various works simultaneously and broaden their horizon of interpretation.
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Ludtke, Laura Elizabeth. "The lightscape of literary London, 1880-1950." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:99e199bf-6a17-4635-bfbf-0f38a02c6319.
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From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.
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Laniel, Marie. "Espaces habités : les récritures de l'appartenance dans l'oeuvre de E. M. Forster et Virginia Woolf." Paris 3, 2008. http://www.theses.fr/2008PA030065.
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Tout en définissant des modalités d’écriture nouvelles, E. M. Forster et Virginia Woolf continuent d’entretenir des liens étroits avec leurs prédécesseurs victoriens et maintiennent avec eux un dialogue ininterrompu. Chacun des deux auteurs passe cet intertexte au crible de sa propre écriture, en développant des stratégies d’adaptation et de détournement qui lui sont propres. Pour prendre possession de cet héritage commun, Forster et Woolf réinvestissent les bastions de l’appartenance victorienne et le fief symbolique de grandes figures littéraires, telles que Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin et Matthew Arnold. Résolus à exorciser les spectres de la Muscular School, ils font des incursions sur le territoire de Thomas Hughes et Charles Kingsley. Pour redéfinir la conception arnoldienne de la culture, ils s’approprient la figure vagabonde du « scholar-gipsy », et mettent en œuvre une pratique de la lecture buissonnière, hors des sentiers battus du canon. Leur réflexion sur l’appartenance littéraire les amène également à revisiter les grands foyers intellectuels du XIXe siècle : les débats philosophiques des « illumers » de Cambridge, la rhétorique flamboyante de Thomas Carlyle, la pensée éclairée de Leslie Stephen, l’imaginaire lumineux de John Tyndall. Au fil de ces pèlerinages littéraires, Forster et Woolf font dévier les itinéraires commémoratifs associés aux romans des sœurs Brontë, à l’imaginaire muséal ruskinien, et aux pageants historiques de Rudyard KiplingAs well as crucial experiments in form and style, the works of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf bear the mark of a vital connection and a continuing dialogue with their Victorian forebears. Engaged in constant critical debate with one another, both writers submit the works of their predecessors to their own specific strategies of adaptation and subversion. In an attempt to come to terms with this common legacy, Forster and Woolf make frequent and disruptive pilgrimages on Victorian territory and revisit the literary haunts of renowned men of letters such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. Determined to confront the ghosts of the Muscular School, they trespass on the literary ground of Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley. To revise Matthew Arnold’s vision of culture, they appropriate the poetic figure of the « scholar-gipsy » and advocate the practice of truant reading, off the beaten track of the literary canon. Their meditation on textual legacy also leads them to revisit the works of nineteenth-century luminaries : the philosophical discussions of the Cambridge « illumers », the flamboyant rhetoric of Thomas Carlyle, the enlightened writings of Leslie Stephen, the imagery of light in John Tyndall’s works. During those literary pilgrimages, Forster and Woolf depart from the commemorative itineraries connected with the Brontë sisters’ novels, John Ruskin’s art criticism, and Rudyard Kipling’s historical pageants
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Iglesias, Christina. "Modernist Unselfing: Religious Experience and British Literature, 1900-1945." Thesis, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7916/D88K8S6M.
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This dissertation examines the role of religious experience in British modernist literature, arguing that a strain of modernist writing drew from different religious traditions to conceptualize and model ways of escaping the confines of the self. In distinctive yet strikingly similar ways, these writers draw from these traditions—orthodox and heterodox, eastern and western—not in an attempt to propound traditional theological ideas but to recapture a religious sensibility that extends beyond dogma or creed: a sensibility that can offer means of getting beyond the self’s limited, solipsistic, and myopic perspective. In response to the perceived decline of religion in late 19th- and early 20th-century British culture; the atomizing effects of industrial modernity; and a growing distrust, informed by contemporary psychology, of the limitations of the self and the self’s perspective, the works this dissertation examines achieve a frame of reference beyond the individual point of view through processes and practices I group under the term “unselfing.” Unselfing emerges in these works as a moral and broadly religious imperative, necessary to achieving authentic communion between people and, paradoxically, to achieving a more authentic relationship to the self; at the same time, these works represent unselfing as an endeavor that is necessarily asymptotic, difficult, and always incomplete. They model unselfing in and through literary form, not only conveying but also embodying processes of unselfing in their formal experimentation. Reading works by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, and T.S. Eliot alongside contemporary psychological, philosophical, and anthropological writings of the period, I show how a pervasive and urgent desire to use spiritual practices to escape the self shaped the development of British modernist literature. Modernist Unselfing thus challenges prevailing accounts of British modernism, according to which secular artistic innovation absorbed and attained the sacred value formerly located in religion. I argue that, on the contrary, these narrow accounts of secularization and aestheticization have obscured what much of modernist experimentation was actively attempting to capture: a desire, often ethically-minded, to forego self.
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White, Siân Elin. "Intimate modernities modern British and Irish literature, 1922-1955 /." 2009. http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-04172009-152044/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2009.Thesis directed by Maud Ellmann for the Department of English. "April 2009." Examines the literary representation of intimacy in British and Irish modernist fiction, with particular focus on the novels of Virginia Woolf, Patrick Hamilton, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-276).
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Saumaa, Hiie. "Meditative Modernism: Tuning the Mind in British Literature, 1890-1940." Thesis, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8TD9VGN.
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This dissertation uncovers a strand in early twentieth century British literature that is currently missing from readings of modernism - a fascination with portraying meditative states of mind. Modernist authors were intrigued by the mind's capacity to be in constant movement between the present, past, and future - what they represented as a stream of consciousness. This study examines the potential of the "still," calm, and concentrated mind in modernist visions of consciousness by exploring how the meditative mind takes a different shape in theme and form in the writings of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. Drawing from the works' preoccupation with physical practices such as spiritual and ritual dance, relaxation techniques, Yoga, the Alexander Technique, and meditative walking, this study highlights the role of the body in views on consciousness in modernist literature. This dissertation argues that looking at modernism through the lens of meditation allows us to see the period not only in terms of the split, wounded self in the fast-paced modern metropolis but reveals its yearning for what the authors in this study call "wholeness," "mind-body harmony," and "the spirit of peace" - a search for peace attainable within, if not without, an attempt to cure the self in the fracturing modern world through experiencing the mind at peace.
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McArthur, Elizabeth Andrews. "Narrative Topography: Fictions of Country, City, and Suburb in the Work of Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan." Thesis, 2012. https://doi.org/10.7916/D89Z9BV7.
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This dissertation analyzes how twentieth- and early twenty-first- century novelists respond to the English landscape through their presentation of narrative and their experiments with novelistic form. Opening with a discussion of the English planning movement, "Narrative Topography" reveals how shifting perceptions of the structure of English space affect the content and form of the contemporary novel. The first chapter investigates literary responses to the English landscape between the World Wars, a period characterized by rapid suburban growth. It reveals how Virginia Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, reconsiders which narrative choices might be appropriate for mobilizing and critiquing arguments about the relationship between city, country, and suburb. The following chapters focus on responses to the English landscape during the present era. The second chapter argues that W. G. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, constructs rural Norfolk and Suffolk as containing landscapes of horror--spaces riddled with sinkholes that lead his narrator to think about near and distant acts of violence. As Sebald intimates that this forms a porous "landscape" in its own right, he draws attention to the fallibility of representation and the erosion of cultural memory. The third chapter focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a novel in which a cloned human being uses descriptions of landscape to express and, more often, to suppress the physical and emotional pain associated with her position in society. By emphasizing his narrator's proclivity towards euphemism and pastiche, Ishiguro intimates that, in an era of mechanical and genetic reproduction, reliance on perspectives formed in past and imagined futures can be quite deadly. The fourth chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's post 9/11 novel, Saturday--a reworking of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. In reading these two novels side-by-side, it reveals how London, its suburbs, and the English countryside might be imagined differently in the contemporary consciousness. Together these chapters investigate why novelistic treatments of the English landscape might interest contemporary readers who live outside England (and/or read these works in translation), especially during an era in which the English landscape has ceased to function as the real or metaphorical center of empire.
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Smolen-Morton, Shawn R. "Acting the child: Separating the infantile from the masculine in film and literature, 1835–1985." 2004. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3152746.
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Acting the Child examines the ways in which adult male characters in film and literature from Europe and America can use the role of the child to their political and emotional advantage. As childhood became an increasingly powerful cultural concept, adult men accessed that power to define themselves and organize social relationships. The thesis proposes “infantilization” as a term to describe how these characters act like children or force other characters into the role of the child. The thesis analyzes key moments in the development of infantilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first chapter explores the uses of infantilization, which produce strong effects in Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. These novels demonstrate the ways in which infantilization creates surrogate families in Parisian society. These roles can define and justify extramarital affairs or same sex relationships, which have no legitimate expression. The second chapter demonstrates how H. G. Wells' criticisms of Victorian culture and politics often revolve around male identity such as the scientist-adventurer. As the concepts of boyhood and girlhood solidified, they could describe individual adults or entire social groups. Infantilization was already part of the political discourse, and my thesis demonstrates how Wells challenged these categories. The third chapter extends the analysis of aggressive, masculine characters by examining D. W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience (1914) and Broken Blossoms (1919) in conjunction with a selection of American recruitment posters for World War I. The analysis shows that World War I had a profound impact on infantilization. Griffith's satirical representation of the man-child subtly criticizes World War I and echoes Wells's attack on Empire. The last chapter explores the effects of the war on infantilization by analyzing three delayed responses: Bernward Vesper's The Trip, Alfons Heck's A Child of Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons. Like Fassbinder, I find German adults acting like children in order to cope with a troubled present.
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Fernandes, Ana Raquel. "What about the Rogue? : survival and metamorphosis in contemporary british literature." Doctoral thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10451/594.
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Tese de doutoramento em Estudos Literários (Literatura Comparada), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Letras, 2008The present dissertation aims at giving an account of the significance of the rogue in contemporary British literature, focusing on this character's survival and metamorphosis particularly from the second half of the 20th century onwards. The thesis is divided into five sections, comprising three main chapters. The opening section is a general introduction showing the main steps in my approach to the subject under discussion and the attending methodology. In the first chapter I deal with the origins of the literature of roguery and the development of the rogue. Starting with the analysis of six previously selected novels, the second chapter studies the revival of the rogue mainly in the 1950s, adopting a comparative perspective. For this purpose I analyse and contextualise the following works: Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth (1944) and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954); John Wain's Hurry on Down (1953), Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), John Braine's Room at the Top (1957) and Allan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). This section closes with an analysis of the transformations undergone by Bill Naughton's radio play, Alfie Elkins and His Little Life (1962), making manifest the multiple possibilities inherent in a character such as the rogue. My third chapter deals with fiction produced in Britain in the last decades of the second millennium and the beginning of a new one, focusing on Martin Amis' and Irvine Welsh's literary works. In their novels, especially Amis's Money: A Suicide Note (1984), London Fields (1989) and Yellow Dog (2003), and Welsh's trilogy Trainspotting (1993), Glue (2001) and Porno (2002), the rogue is an effective vehicle for both the depiction and the questioning of the society we live in. The conclusion brings together the main ideas developed in the thesis, concentrating on the characteristics of the rogue and the literature of roguery in the present. The dissertation closes with a section containing attachments and bibliography.
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"From Indeterminacy to Acknowledgment: Topoi of Lesbianism in Transatlantic Fiction by Women, 1925-1936." Doctoral diss., 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.14866.
Full textAbstract:
abstract: This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters.Dissertation/Thesis
Ph.D. English 2012
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Costa, Dominique Maria Figueira Curado Castanheira da. "Narrative technique in postmodernist british fiction: a narratological analysis of selected novels by John Fowles and Peter Ackroyd: The collector (1963): The french lieutenant`s woman (1969): A Maggot (1985): Hawksmoor (1985)." Doctoral thesis, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.13/1408.
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Melville, Joan Virginia. "The Theatre of Anon: Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf, and the Performance of Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King." Thesis, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7916/D83X8DVG.
Full textAbstract:
Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf: three major figures of British art and letters who have received much critical attention individually, but have not yet been studied together. In this project I consider the valedictory works of these artists at their convergence, first through their obvious geographic, familial, and aesthetic relationships, then in more subtle, deeper, and overarching dimensions. The chief texts that are the focus of this dissertation are Tennyson's Idylls of the King, plus five of the Laureate's most popular poems; Cameron's photographic illustrations of these poems; and a selection of Virginia Woolf's late work, with a focus on "The Searchlight," Three Guineas, Between the Acts, and Anon. The dissertation also makes use of apposite poems, essays, life writing, and fiction created by these artists. Since "The Theatre of Anon" focuses primarily on Cameron's Illustrations, a chapter containing photographs of all the books' pages concludes the dissertation text. An additional selection of images is included as an appendix, in support of the central thesis of this project. The complex friendship between Tennyson and Cameron inspired the latter's only published book, a collection of poetic excerpts accompanied by images of his poems staged as scenes from amateur theatricals. The photos, with the photographer acting as their playwright-director, evoke the literary pageant in Woolf's last novel. In photographing the Illustrations, Cameron took control of the Laureate's poetry, metaphorically assuming the role of Vivien stealing Merlin's poetic spells. This dissertation traces Woolf's perception of her great aunt as it evolved over the decades, beginning with the eccentric, affected, and comical Cameron of Freshwater (1926) and ultimately portraying her as a dynamic, determined, and creative artist who helped provide inspiration for the character of the playwright-director Miss La Trobe of Between the Acts (1940). I argue that her great aunt's work influenced Woolf to create the figure she called Anon as a counterpart to Tennyson's King Arthur, and to place La Trobe's pageant-play at the center of her last novel, Between the Acts, as a final act of homage to Cameron. An aggregate of all anonymous minstrels, artists, and authors who ever lived, Anon appears in the guise of Miss La Trobe, whose communal, participatory art demonstrates how the traditionally monocular "eye" of history can be enlarged in community theatre from a single "I" to a collaborative project accommodating multiple perspectives. The Arthurian chivalry to which the ideology of Anon is set in counterpoint represents a conservative point of view based on the belief in a divinely-ordained social order headed by a monarch, with prescribed roles for each of its members. Valor in combat and devotion in courtly love, chivalry's two chief expressions, are the basis of Arthur's knightly code, which has influenced British national character and identity from the country's founding. Arthur reached his Anglophone apotheosis in the nineteenth-century's Gothic revival, epitomized in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. At the end of her career, at the start of the Second World War, Woolf came to believe that theatrical performance offered a better paradigm for social organization than the chivalric hierarchy at the root of the patriarchal British Victorian culture in which she had grown up. She saw in the community theatre a gathering place that could foster moments of transcendent unity, intellectual freedom, and imaginative inspiration, and in drama an art form resilient enough to withstand an audience's interruption and disillusionment. Performance provided a collaborative alternative to the conservative constraints that were her Victorian legacy; history, she felt, could be more accurately portrayed through the accretion of expressive theatrical performances than by the monolithic, linear narrative it had become as the official transcript of the nation's past. The theatricals scenes of La Trobe's pageant and Cameron's Illustrations - both composed of scraps and fragments of quotidian life rearranged and recombined - offer a new visual conception of the past. Working at the level of what Walter Benjamin has called photography's optical unconscious the dissertation demonstrates how Cameron's photographs reveal a reconstellation or reconfiguration, of the dominant British narrative from defamiliarized versions of the past that resonate with La Trobe's pageant. I propose that Cameron's photos re-envision canonical texts, inspiring a new mythology for Woolf, one that reflects a fluid and elastic version of the British national story. Challenging the received Carlylean conception of history as the biographies of great men, Woolf's counter-history, like Cameron's book of illustrations, features ordinary men and women playing extraordinary roles. The legendary Arthur, traditionally credited with uniting the country's thirteen tribes, founding Britain, and shaping the nation's identity, is but one actor among many in Woolf's pageant of history; his starring role in Tennyson's Idylls of the King is reduced to a few key scenes in the Illustrations and a cameo appearance in Between the Acts. Woolf implies that though there may still be room in history's narrative for heroic men, they will no longer dominate it. With its evolving, democratic nature, the community theatre created by Anon offers a paradigm of citizenship and social organization that Woolf believed could encompass British history, re-envision it, and offer the world's citizens hope for the future.
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Mitras, Joao Luis. "Postmodern or post-Catholic? : a study of British Catholic writers and their fictions in a postmodern and postconciliar world." Diss., 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/18636.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is an investigation into the nature of the 'postmodern' narrative strategies and fictional
methods in the work of two British Catholic writers. The work of David Lodge and Muriel Spark is
here taken as an example ofthe 'Catholic novel'. In order to determine ifthe overlap ofpostmodern.
and Christian-influenced narrative strategies constitutes more than a convergence or coincidence of
formal concerns, narrative form in these novels is analyzed in the light of neo-Tho mist and Tho mist
aesthetics, a traditional Catholic Christian theory of the arts. The 'postmodern' in these 'Christian'
texts becomes largely a coincidence of terminology. Narrative forms which can be classified as
'postmodern' can also be categorized using the terminology of Thomas Aquinas. The apparent
similarities betray radically divergent metaphysical presuppositions, however. The nature of the
Catholic 'difference' lies in the way postmodern forms are used to challenge the metaphysical
bases of those forms.English Studies
M.A. (English)