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Allen, Lea Knudsen. "Cosmopolite subjectivities and the Mediterranean in early modern England." View abstract/electronic edition; access limited to Brown University users, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3318286.
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Hedler, Elizabeth. "Stories of Canada : national identity in late-nineteenth-century English-Canadian fiction /." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/HedlerE2003.pdf.
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Kläger, Florian. "Forgone nations : constructions of national identity in Elizabethan historiography and literature: Stanihurst, Spenser, Shakespeare /." Trier : Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2006. http://deposit.d-nb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2869764&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Harvey, Alison Dean. "Irish realism women, the novel, and national politics,1870-1922 /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1417800181&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Huerta, Marisa. "Re-reading the New World romance : British colonization and the construction of "race" in the early modern period /." View online version; access limited to Brown University users, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3174621.
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Pettegree, Jane K. "Foreign and native on the English stage, 1588-1611 : metaphor and national identity." Thesis, St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/786.
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May, Chad T. "Trauma and the historical imagination in British and American fiction, 1814-1986 /." view abstract or download file of text, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3181110.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-199). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Stafford, Brooke Alyson. "Outside England : mobility and early modern Englishness /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9326.
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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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Baker, Deena Michelle. ""What now?": Willa Cather's successful male professionals at middle age." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2006. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/3167.
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This thesis examines three male characters from Willa Cather's writing that epitomize the American Dream of professional and material success but they find no contentment once they achieve it. This disillusionment is particularly so with Cather's driven male professionals, Bartley Alexander (an architectural scholar), and Clement Sebastian (a critically acclaimed, international opera singer). Cather situates these characters at middle age and at the peak of their professional careers, which makes the examination of them an interesting study as to the effects of the encroaching modern age on successful men. This thesis begins with a brief overview of Cather's work, including scholarly criticism of each novel, progresses to the examination of her successful male characters, and concludes with the investigation of Cather as a Modernist writer.
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Light, Alison. "Forever England : femininity, literature, and conservatism between the wars /." London ; New York : Routledge, 1991. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0648/91000587-d.html.
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Hanson, Paul Michael. "Beyond settler consciousness : new geographies of nation in two novels by Margaret Laurence and Fiona Kidman : a thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English /." ResearchArchive@Victoria e-Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10063/916.
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Pauk, Filgueira Barbara. "Crossing the channel : socio-cultural exchanges in English and French women's writings - 1830-1900." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0083.
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The focus of this study is an investigation of cross-channel exchanges represented in travelogues, historical works, journalism, letters and journals written by English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh on France and by French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart on England. The work is based on the view that narratives about another culture betray preconceptions and beliefs and are never innocent descriptions. Nineteenth-century English descriptions of France, for instance, are not only marked by the stereotype of the gregarious French bon vivant but also by the often tense political relationship and economical concurrence between the two countries. French descriptions of England reflect the consciousness of England's superiority in the domains of economy, industry and colonialism as well as the stereotype of the boring, monosyllabic, haughty, egoistic and often xenophobic Englishman. Given that writings on the other culture are marked by practices and belief systems as well as notions of superiority and inferiority like texts emerging from a colonial context, ideas which have been developed in this field by scholars such as Sara Mills and Reina Lewis have been used as a basis for this investigation. I argue that the women whose texts I analyse strategically employ 'discourses of difference' (to use Sara Mills' term), or alignment and 'othering' in regard to nation, class, and political opinion, in order to gain positions which allow them to challenge contemporary ideologies of femininity. They take advantage of their positions in very different ways, according to their personal, class and economic situations, their agenda, and their gendered position within society which changes significantly during the century. The English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh construct themselves as part of the tradition of French salonnières from the seventeenth century to the present, while the French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart align themselves with English travel writers, particularly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Through a careful construction of these foremothers, which often differed from other representations of them, they criticise gender politics in their own country and endeavour to normalise their own activities as intellectuals and writers, in the case of Tristan as a socialist and feminist activist. This strategy is complemented by 'othering' with regard to nation, class and political convictions which confers on the women an authoritative authorial voice and / or allows them to support their argument. They endorse ideologies of gender, nation and class at the same time as they reject some aspects of them. This study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century discussions of the so-called 'woman question' through a broader approach which encompasses not only the parameters of gender, class and political orientation but also cross-cultural experience.
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Khoury, Nicole Michelle. "Hybrid identity and Arab/American feminism in Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2005. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2862.
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In her novel Arabian Jazz, Diana Abu-Jaber attempts to explore the Arab American identity as something new; as an identity that exists related to, but ultimately separate from, the Arab and American identities from which it was originally created. This thesis discusses the emergence of the depiction of the Arab American female identity in the novel, examining how the characters explore issues of race, class, imperialism, and sex within both the Arab and the American cultures as those issues shape female identity. The thesis also presents a rhetorical analysis of the speeches that allow the characters a voice with respect to how identity is shaped and reshaped throughout the novel.
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Frazier, Dustin M. "A Saxon state : Anglo-Saxonism and the English nation, 1703-1805." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4146.
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For the past century, medievalism studies generally and Anglo-Saxonism studies in particular have largely dismissed the eighteenth century as a dark period in English interest in the Anglo-Saxons. Recent scholarship has tended to elide Anglo-Saxon studies with Old English studies and consequently has overlooked contributions from fields such as archaeology, art history and political philosophy. This thesis provides the first re-examination of scholarly, antiquarian and popular Anglo-Saxonism in eighteenth-century England and argues that, far from disappearing, interest in Anglo-Saxon culture and history permeated British culture and made significant contributions to contemporary formulations and expressions of Englishness and English national, legal and cultural identities. Each chapter examines a different category of Anglo-Saxonist production or activity, as those categories would be distributed across current scholarship, in order to explore the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons were understood and deployed in the construction of contemporary cultural- historiographical narratives. The first three chapters contain, respectively, a review of the achievements of the ‘Oxford school' of Saxonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; antiquarian Anglo-Saxon studies by members of the Society of Antiquaries of London and their correspondents; and historiographical presentations of the Anglo-Saxons in local, county and national histories. Chapters four and five examine the appearance of the Anglo-Saxons in visual and dramatic art, and the role of Anglo-Saxonist legal and juridical language in eighteenth-century politics, with reference to discoveries resulting from the academic and antiquarian research outlined in chapters one to three. It is my contention that Anglo-Saxonism came to serve as a unifying ideology of origins for English citizens concerned with national history, and political and social institutions. As a popular as well as scholarly ideology, Anglo-Saxonism also came to define English national character and values, an English identity recognised and celebrated as such both at home and abroad.
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Woo, Chimi. "Cross-Cultural Encounter And The Novel: Nation, Identity, And Genre In Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1204725332.
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Kahyana, Danson Sylvester. "Negotiating (trans)national identities in Ugandan literature." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86498.
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Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines how selected Ugandan literary texts portray constructions and negotiations of national identities as they intersect with overlapping and cross-cutting identities like race, ethnicity, gender, religious denomination, and political affiliation. The word “negotiations” is central to the close reading of selected focal texts I offer in this thesis for it implies that there are times when a tension may arise between national identity and one or more of these other identities (for instance when races or ethnic groups are imagined outside the nation as foreigners) or between one national identity (say Ugandan) and other national identities (say British) for those characters who occupy more than one national space and whose understanding of home therefore includes a here (say Britain) and a there (say Uganda). The study therefore examines the portrayal of how various borders (internal and external, sociocultural and geopolitical) are navigated in particular literary texts in order to construct, reconstruct, and perform (trans)national identity. The concept of the border is crucial to this study because any imagining of community is done against a backdrop of similarities (what the “us” share in common) and differences (what makes the “them” distinct from “us”). Drawing from various theorists of nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism and gender, I explore the representation of key events in Uganda’s history (for instance colonialism, decolonization, expulsion, and civil war) and investigate how selected writers narrate/sing these events in their constructions of Ugandan (trans)national identities. My analysis is guided by insights drawn from the work of the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia. His proposition that the novel is a site for the dialogic interaction of multiple languages (say of authorities, generations and social groups) and of speeches (say of narrators, characters and authors) each espousing a particular worldview or ideology enables me to create a correlation between literary texts and the nation (which contains a multiplicity of identities like races, ethnic groups, genders, religious denominations and political affiliations with each having its own interests and ‘language’), and to argue that Ugandan national identity is constituted by the existence of these very identities that overlap with it. By paying attention to the way selected literary texts portray how these disparate identities dialogue with the larger national community in different situations and how the national community in turn dialogues with other nations through cultural exchanges, migration, exile and diaspora, this study aims at unravelling the dynamics involved in the negotiation of (trans)national identities both within the nation and outside it.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek hoe geselekteerde Ugandese literêre tekste vorms, hervormings en onderhandelings van nasionale identiteite – na mate hulle deurvleg word deur oorvleuelende en dwarssnydende identitite soos díe van ras, etnisiteit, gender, godsdienstige denominasies en politieke affiliasies – uitbeeld. Die term “onderhandelings” staan sentraal in die diepte-lesing van geselekteerde fokus-tekste wat ek in hierdie tesis aanbied, want dit impliseer dat daar tye is wanneer ‘n spanning mag onstaan tussen nasionale identiteit en een of meer van hierdie ander identiteite (byvoorbeeld wanneer rasse of etniese groepe gekarakteriseer word as buite die nasie, m.a.w. as vreemdelinge), of tussen een nasionale identiteit (bv. Ugandees) en ander nasionale identiteite (bv. Brits) vir daardie karakters wat meer as een nasionale ruimte beset of wie se begrip van hul tuiste dus inbegrepe is van ‘n hier (bv. Brittanje) sowel as ‘n daar (soos bv.Uganda). Om hierdie rede ondersoek die studie die uitbeelding van maniere waarop verskeie soorte (interne en eksterne, sosio-kulturele en geo-politiese) grense gehanteer word in partikulêre literêre tekste ten einde (trans)nasionale identiteite te konstrueer, omvorm, of uit te beeld. Die konsep van ‘n grens is die belangrikste idee in hierdie studie, want enige konseptualisering van ‘n gemeenskap gebeur teen die agtergrond van gemeenhede (wat die “ons” in gemeen het) en verskille (wat “hulle” onderskei van “ons”). Met behulp van verskeie teoretici van nasionalisme, post-kolonialisme, trans-nasionalismes en gender, ondersoek ek die uitbeeldings van kern-gebeurtenisse in die geskiedenis van Uganda (byvoobeeld kolonialisme, dekolonialisering, verbanning van sekere mense en groepe en die burgeroorlog) en analiseer ek hoe sekere skrywers hierdie gebeurtenisse uitbeeld of verhaal in hulle konstruksies van Ugandese (trans)nasionalisme/s. My analises word gelei deur insigte verleen aan die oeuvre van die Russiese literêre teoretikus Mikhael Bakhtin, veral sy konsepte van dialogisme en heteroglossia. Sy voorstel dat die roman die ruimte is vir die interaksie van verskeie ‘tale’ (byvoorbeeld díe van outoriteite, ouderdoms- en sosiale groepe) en van diskoerse (bv. díe van vertellers, karakters en skrywers) wat elkeen ‘n partikulêre wêreldbeeld of ideologie aanbied of aanhang, stel my in die posisie om ‘n korrelasie te skep tussen die literêre tekste en die nasie (wat self ‘n oorvloed van identiteite soos díe van rasse, etniese groepe, genders, godsdienstige denominasies of politieke affiliasies bevat) en om te kan argumenteer dat die Ugandese nasionale identiteit konstitueer word deur die bestaan van presies hierdie (ander) identiteite wat daarmee saamval of oorvleuel. Deur aandag te gee aan die manier waarop geselekteerde literêre tekste die dialoë tussen hierdie onderskeie identiteite uitbeeld, elk waarvan hul eie belange en ‘tale’ behels, en hoe die nasionale identiteit op sy/haar beurt in gesprek is met ander nasies deur middel van kulturele uitruiling, migrasies, eksiel of diaspora, mik hierdie studie daarna om die dinamika van onderhandelings van (trans)nasionale identiteite beide binne asook buite die nasionale raamwerk uit te lig.
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Kaplin, David. "The best policy : lying and national identity in Victorian and French novels /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3202897.
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Mai, Alex Chih-Yuan. "Sacrificial forms the libretti in English 1940-2000 /." Thesis restricted. Connect to e-thesis to view abstract, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/437/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Arnold, Jennifer Louise. "Translating national identity : the translation and reception of Catalan literature into English." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7889/.
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This thesis examines reader responses to Catalan identity through the reception of two Catalan novels in translation: Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal and For a Sack of Bones by Lluís- Anton Baulenas. Drawing on theories from Descriptive Translation Studies and cultural and sociological approaches to translation, it examines how representations of Catalan culture and identity are subject to influence from different agents at each stage of the translation and reception process. The thesis explores three areas: the role of translation within Catalan culture in the promotion of Catalan identity; the way in which this role is relevant to the translation process itself within the target culture; and finally whether the objectives of this role are achieved within the target market. This study offers a new approach to the study of the reader within Translation Studies, using blogs, online reviews and reading groups in order to gain access to real reader responses to translated literature and offers a methodology by which the study of the representation of culture through translation may be explored. The results of this study have relevance not only to translation research and practice, but also to translation policy, particularly for minority cultures.
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Mitchell, Sarah L. "A post-conquest English retrospect upon the age of the Anglo-Saxons : a study of the early-middle-English verse chronicle attributed to Robert of Gloucester." Thesis, University of York, 1998. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2445/.
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Honka, Agnes. "Writing an alternative Australia : women and national discourse in nineteenth-century literature." Master's thesis, Universität Potsdam, 2007. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/1650/.
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In this thesis, I want to outline the emergence of the Australian national identity in colonial Australia. National identity is not a politically determined construct but culturally produced through discourse on literary works by female and male writers. The emergence of the dominant bushman myth exhibited enormous strength and influence on subsequent generations and infused the notion of “Australianness” with exclusively male characteristics. It provided a unique geographical space, the bush, on and against which the colonial subject could model his identity. Its dominance rendered non-male and non-bush experiences of Australia as “un-Australian.”
I will present a variety of contemporary voices – postcolonial, Aboriginal, feminist, cultural critics – which see the Australian identity as a prominent topic, not only in the academia but also in everyday culture and politics. Although positioned in different disciplines and influenced by varying histories, these voices share a similar view on Australian society: Australia is a plural society, it is home to millions of different people – women, men, and children, Aboriginal Australians and immigrants, newly arrived and descendents of the first settlers – with millions of different identities which make up one nation. One version of national identity does not account for the multitude of experiences; one version, if applied strictly, renders some voices unheard and oppressed.
After exemplifying how the literature of the 1890s and its subsequent criticism constructed the itinerant worker as “the” Australian, literary productions by women will be singled out to counteract the dominant version by presenting different opinions on the state of colonial Australia. The writers Louisa Lawson, Barbara Baynton, and Tasma are discussed with regard to their assessment of their mother country. These women did not only present a different picture, they were also gifted writers and lived the ideal of the “New Women:” they obtained divorces, remarried, were politically active, worked for their living and led independent lives. They paved the way for many Australian women to come.
In their literary works they allowed for a dual approach to the bush and the Australian nation. Louisa Lawson credited the bushwoman with heroic traits and described the bush as both cruel and full of opportunities not known to women in England. She understood women’s position in Australian society as oppressed and tried to change politics and culture through the writings in her feminist magazine the Dawn and her courageous campaign for women suffrage. Barbara Baynton painted a gloomy picture of the Australian bush and its inhabitants and offered one of the fiercest critiques of bush society. Although the woman is presented as the able and resourceful bushperson, she does not manage to survive in an environment which functions on male rules and only values the economic potential of the individual. Finally, Tasma does not present as outright a critique as Barbara Baynton, however, she also attests the colonies a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England. Tasma attests that the colonies had a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England and demonstrates how uncertainties and irritations emerged in the course of Australia’s nation formation.
These three women, as writers, commentators, and political activists, faced exclusion from the dominant literary discourses. Their assessment of colonial society remained unheard for a long time. Now, after much academic excavation, these voices speak to us from the past and remind us that people are diverse, thus nation is diverse. Dominant power structures, the institutions and individuals who decide who can contribute to the discourse on nation, have to be questioned and reassessed, for they mute voices which contribute to a wider, to the “full”, and maybe “real” picture of society.Das heutige Australien ist eine heterogene Gesellschaft, welche sich mit dem Vermächtnis der Vergangenheit – der Auslöschung und Unterdrückung der Ureinwohner – aber auch mit andauernden Immigrationswellen beschäftigen muss. Aktuelle Stimmen in den australischen Literatur-, Kultur- und Geschichtswissenschaften betonen die Prominenz der Identitätsdebatte und weisen auf die Notwendigkeit einer aufgeschlossenen und einschließenden Herangehensweise an das Thema. Vor diesem Hintergrund erinnern uns die Stimmen der drei in dieser Arbeit behandelten Schriftstellerinnen daran, dass es nicht nur eine Version von nationaler Identität gibt. Die Pluralität einer Gesellschaft spiegelt sich in ihren Texten wieder, dies war der Fall im neunzehnten Jahrhundert und ist es heute noch. So befasst sich die vorliegende Arbeit mit der Entstehung nationaler Identität im Australien des späten neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Es wird von der Prämisse ausgegangen, dass nationale Identität nicht durch politische Entscheidungen determiniert wird, sondern ein kulturelles Konstrukt, basierend auf textlichen Diskurs, darstellt. Dieser ist nicht einheitlich, sondern mannigfaltig, spiegelt somit verschiedene Auffassungen unterschiedlicher Urheber über nationale Identität wider. Ziel der Arbeit ist es anhand der Texte australischer Schriftstellerinnen aufzuzeigen, dass neben einer dominanten Version der australischen Identität, divergierende Versionen existierten, die eine flexiblere Einschätzung des australischen Charakters erlaubt, einen größeren Personenkreis in den Rang des „Australiers“ zugelassen und die dominante Version hinterfragt hätten. Die Zeitschrift Bulletin wurde in den 1890ern als Sprachrohr der radikalen Nationalisten etabliert. Diese forderten eine Loslösung der australischen Kolonien von deren Mutterland England und riefen dazu auf, Australien durch australische Augen zu beschreiben. Dem Aufruf folgten Schriftsteller, Maler und Künstler und konzentrierten ihren Blick auf die für sie typische australische Landschaft, den „Busch“. Schriftsteller, allen voran Henry Lawson, glorifizierten die Landschaft und ihre Bewohner; Pioniere und Siedler wurden zu Nationalhelden stilisiert. Der australische „bushman“ - unabhängig, kumpelhaft und losgelöst von häuslichen und familiären Verpflichtungen - wurde zum „typischen“ Australier. Die australische Nation wurde mit männlichen Charaktereigenschaften assoziiert und es entstand eine Version der zukünftigen Nation, die Frauen und die Australischen Ureinwohner als Nicht-Australisch propagierte, somit von dem Prozess der Nationsbildung ausschloss. Nichtsdestotrotz verfassten australische Schriftstellerinnen Essays, Romane und Kurzgeschichten, die alternative Versionen zur vorherrschenden und zukünftigen australischen Nation anboten. In dieser Arbeit finden Louisa Lawson, Barbara Baynton und Tasma Beachtung. Letztere ignoriert den australischen Busch und bietet einen Einblick in den urbanen Kosmos einer sich konsolidierenden Nation, die, obwohl tausende Meilen von ihrem Mutterland entfernt, nach Anerkennung und Vergleich mit diesem durstet. Lawson und Baynton, hingegen, präsentieren den Busch als einen rechtlosen Raum, der vor allem unter seinen weiblichen Bewohnern emotionale und physische Opfer fordert.
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Smith, Trevor Russell. "National identity, propaganda, and the ethics of war in English historical literature, 1327-77." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2017. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/20822/.
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This thesis argues against the common assumption that English writers ignored the ethical problems of war during the particularly brutal wars of Edward III, king of England, 1327–77. English historical literature in this period is typically mined for ‘facts’ to create visions of the past, or read as literature with little context, but never properly considered for its engagement with the morality of warfare. Chapter One shows that the many uncertain aspects of war, such as intention, are those that most affect how military acts are judged. Chapter Two argues that writers use theo-retical frameworks in a more nuanced and rhetorical sense than commonly believed. Chapter Three argues against the common belief that there was no concept of civilian immunity in the period, and demonstrates how writers present these civilian victims in different ways to attach moral value to those who attack them. Chapter Four examines how writers show the English to only attack enemy civilians, in their campaigns of devastation on a day-to-day basis, to force the enemy to do battle, and thereby end war. Chapter Five shows that writers avoid any of the morally unsavoury aspects of violence but revel in the suffering endured by their own men as meritorious asceticism. Chapter Six assesses how writers engage with the difficulties of ending hostilities and offering mercy, especially when martial culture encouraged bellicosity and vengeance. The thesis focuses throughout on the often nuanced and sensitive perspectives of English writers in this period before the age of Chaucer. The Appendix introduces each of the main sources used throughout this thesis and provides a detailed list of their manuscripts. The many errors and poor descriptions repeated in scholarship are corrected throughout. Several previously unidentified manuscripts, variant versions, and previously unknown texts have been described.
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Dymoke, Sue. "The teaching of poetry in secondary schools." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.343867.
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Jenkins, Bethan Mair. "Concepts of Prydeindod (Britishness) in 18th century Anglo-Welsh Writing : with special reference to the works of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:02c515c0-7f80-468b-b63c-97ead68fb2f1.
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This thesis presents an analysis of the English-language work of three Welsh writers during the eighteenth century, spanning the period of the 1750s to 1794. During this period, the British state consolidated its power following the last of the significant internal uprisings in 1745, and attempted to create a British nation with internal unity. Such a unity entailed a renegotiation of older national identities as subjects attempted to partake of multiple identities simultaneously. In Wales, the manifestation of multiple identities was especially clear, as the language of the state did not accord with the mother tongue of the majority of Welshmen. Though Welsh literati had written in English since before the Act of Union (1536), choosing to write in English becomes more interesting for the critic during such a time of change. Previously, these works have been treated as aberrations, or literary curiosities less worthy of note than the Welsh-language productions of the same authors. This thesis argues that, instead, they should be analysed as offering an insight into these authors’ conception of Britain, and their place within the state and the new nation, both in the choice of language and the topics considered. As a theoretical basis for these analyses, I consider the concept of Prydeindod from the work of philosopher J.R. Jones, as distinct from the idea of Britishness, and as a way of complicating Anglocentric or binary discussions of Britishness. This in turn informs readings of the English-language productions of Welsh writers in the eighteenth century, and shows that their negotiations of new identities are not as forthright as has previously been assumed.
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Oergel, Naike. "The return of King Arthur and the Niebelungen : the significance of national myth in nineteenth-century English and German literature." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359856.
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Palsdottir, Anna Heida. "History, landscape and national identity : a comparative study of contemporary English and Icelandic literature for children." Thesis, Coventry University, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.247964.
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Piasecki, Bohdan A. "Anthologies of contemporary Polish poetry in English translation : paratexts, narratives, and the manipulation of national literatures." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2010. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/55714/.
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Schneider, Star. "The Un-American American: Edgar Allan Poe and the Problem of National Genre." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/902.
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This thesis seeks to account for Edgar Allan Poe's reception as an "American" author. Historically, it took time for Poe to become recognized as an American author rather than as an author who happened to also be American. This thesis argues that one major reason for this problem is that the American influences of his work are largely coded, but that Poe nevertheless was writing for an American audience and that his work did develop in response to national influences.
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Bender, Ashley Brookner Pettit Alexander. "Personal properties stage props and self-expression in British drama, 1600-1707 /." [Denton, Tex.] : University of North Texas, 2009. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12081.
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Swens, Arvidsson Marith. "British English versus American English in a Swedish School : -an investigation about attitude, preferences and reality among students, teachers and National Tests." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Engelska, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-25521.
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This essay is an investigation of varieties of English used, learned, and taught, in a Swedish school. The age of the students is 15-16 and they attend grade 9. The hypothesis of this essay is that American English is the variety most students prefer and use, and that British English is the variety mainly preferred by teachers and the school system. This do not collaborate with the ‘learner-centered learning’ pedagogical view (Modiano 2009:172). The data is mainly collected in three areas. 1: a teacher survey, to determine the teachers ́ views and opinions of the varieties of English. 2: a student survey, to examine whether the students prefer one variety to the other, and if they are even aware of what variety they are speaking, and 3: the data gathered from transcribing this year’s English National Test to determine what types of English that are represented in the test. The result of this essay confirms the hypothesis that AmE is the variety both preferred and used by younger students in Sweden today, and that these students do find that they are allowed to use any variety they wish while learning in school. BrE is still the variety preferred by teachers and the school system, however AmE is catching up. Furthermore, the students do have a high level of participation in their own acquisition of English.
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Kecskes, Gabriella. "Representations of the Nation through Corporeal Narrativity in Contemporary Multicultural British Fiction." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2010. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/61769.
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EnglishPh.D.
This dissertation focuses on the function of human bodies in articulations of the nation in contemporary British multicultural fiction, more specifically in novels by Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, and Monica Ali. Combining the Andersonean claim that narrative fiction is an especially sensitive medium for imagining the nation with Daniel Punday‘s assertion that the human body is the basic organizing principle of narrative structure, this study examines the ways in which corporeal representations in novels negotiate dominant paradigms of the national imaginary. Each chapter focuses on a key text from which it opens up the discussion to the authors‘ oeuvre. The study establishes the palimpsest as a mode of representation and interpretation of cultural and national identities showcased in Rushdie‘s The Moor‘s Last Sigh. The fragmentation of narrative and human subjectivity via the trope of the palimpsest in this novel is central to conceptualizations of the nation in Rushdie‘s oeuvre as well as in the other texts in this study. Based on the make-up of Rushdie‘s palimpsests, the characters‘ bodies manifest not a mixture of different elements but a conglomerate of often mutually exclusive, yet intrinsically combined alternatives. For V. S. Naipaul, the function of corporeality is the negotiation of the national imaginary via representations of narrative space. In The Enigma of Arrival as in his other novels, Naipaul uses circuitous movement and palimpsestic layering of the kinetic space to complicate agency for his characters, to emphasize the illusory nature of narrative authority, and to call attention to the ambiguous operations of national and postcolonial discourse. Hanif Kureishi‘s The Body among his other novels shows a ground-breaking attitude toward the possibilities of narrativity in the age of transmutable corporeality. His characters‘ diminishing corporeal presence is the source of their agency and their increasingly complex cultural identifications. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali‘s keen attention to kinetic space creates unexpected ripples in the narration and the protagonist‘s cultural identification, which shift the meaning of the novel from an optimistic ethnic/gender emancipation narrative to claiming agency by resisting cultural affiliations.
Temple University--Theses
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Valladares, Susan. "English Romantic theatre during the Peninsular War." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a6dc8702-5827-41c9-bb82-94a52ecb5dee.
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Between 1808 and 1814 England was committed to an expensive and bloody campaign against the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The Peninsular War, as it came to be known, was initially celebrated as a war of national independence that attracted widespread support. Soon after, it was characterised by political scandal and public controversy. Literary scholars have devoted much attention to the political, social and cultural effects of the French Revolution, but have written surprisingly little about the later years of the campaign against Napoleonic France. The principle objective of this thesis is to offer the first in-depth study of English theatre during the Peninsular War. It considers the most popular plays in performance, and asks what their staging, publication, and reception history reveal about a nation’s literary tastes and its political self-awareness. Sheridan’s Pizarro, a play about the Spanish conquest of Peru, was one of the most successful plays on the Romantic stage. A close analysis of this play considers its popularity between 1799 and 1815, and what it suggests about the flexibility of the contemporary repertoire system. Audiences’ ability to ascribe topical inflections to old plays helps explain the demand for Shakespeare and the bard’s political import to wartime audiences. This thesis explores the London patent stages and popular minor theatres, where programmes were restricted to song, dance, and spectacle. It also offers a case study of provincial theatre in Bristol, underscoring the significant limitations in assumptions that the metropolitan stage was representative of national trends. Archival research on the London and Bristol stages has been crucial to this study, which is based on an examination of playbills, memoranda, letters, playtexts, and prints. The newsprint and cartoons discussed offer an important political and historical framework, suggestive of the cultural expectations likely to have influenced contemporary playgoers.
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May, Anthony. "The construction of national identity in Northern Ireland and Scotland : culture and politics after Thatcher." Thesis, Kingston University, 2013. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/26592/.
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This study examines the construction of cultural nationalism in Northern Ireland and Scotland post-1979. Two particularly significant processes and practices are selected for analysis; football and literature. The methodological approach taken is a synthesis of ethnosymbolism, modernism, and cultural materialism, and nations are discussed as cultural constructs. Nationalism produced at both the elite and popular levels is considered, to provide a greater level of insight into the construction of national identity. The different nationally defined identities discussed are Scottish nationalism, Irish nationalism, unionism, and two varieties of Northern Irish nationalism. One of these is ecumenical, and is largely produced by literary elites. The other is loyalist, and is produced at the popular level. Scottish nationalism is produced through literature and through football, and is largely defined by working class values. As a consequence, literature has become a “popular” social practice in Scotland. Irish nationalism is also produced through literature and football; literature remains an elite practice in Northern Ireland, however. As well as fan groups, individual footballers play a key role in the production of Irish nationalism within Northern Ireland. The rejection of the Northern Ireland team by players of an Irish Catholic background, in favour of the team of the Republic of Ireland, is significant. Irish and Scottish nationalism have often been seen as antagonistic; however, there is an increasingly positive relationship between the two. In the novels of Irvine Welsh, Irish and Scottish identities are mutually informative; the identities of many Celtic fans, including the influential fan group “the Green Brigade”, are similarly constructed. Scottish and Irish nationalism are culturally “other” to unionism and loyalism, and are brought together by this common “enemy”. Most Rangers supporters consider themselves to be culturally unionist. Their identity is unlike that expressed by fans in other parts of the United Kingdom, and paradoxically appears nationalist as a consequence. The Northern Ireland national football team has become a symbol of loyalism, which is considered as a form of national identity because its rituals and symbolism are distinctively Northern Irish, not “British”. In adopting a nationally defined team, loyalists demonstrate the importance of Northern Ireland to their identity, rather than the United Kingdom.
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Hughes, Bonnie K. "“[T]he subtle but powerful cement of a patriotic literature”: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies, National Identity, and the Canon." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/22760.
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The dissertation investigates the correlations among the development of general anthologies of Canadian literature, the Canadian canon, and visions of national identity. While literature anthologies are widely used in university classrooms, the influential role of the anthology in the critical study of literature has been largely overlooked, particularly in Canada. The dissertation begins with an analysis of the stages of development of general anthologies of Canadian literature, demonstrating that there are important links between dominant critical trends and the guiding interests of the various phases of anthology development and that anthologies both reflect and participate in moulding views of the nation and its literature. Focusing then upon five eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canadian authors, the dissertation traces their treatment in anthologies and analyzes in detail the impact of stages of anthology development upon authors’ inclusion and presentation. The reception of Frances Brooke, John Richardson, William Kirby, Susanna Moodie, and Emily Pauline Johnson over a span of nearly 90 years is examined, and points of inclusion and exclusion are scrutinized to determine links with prevailing critical interests as well as canonical status. These case studies reveal the functions of anthologies, which include recovering overlooked authors, amending past oversights, reflecting new areas of critical inquiry, and preserving the national literary tradition. Their treatment also reveals the effect of larger critical concerns, such as alignment with dominant visions of the nation, considerations of genre, and reassessments of past views. The dissertation shows that the anthology is a carefully constructed, culturally valuable work that plays an important role in literary criticism and canon formation and is a genre worthy of careful scrutiny.
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Brown, Ian. "History as theatrical metaphor : history, myth and national identities in modern Scottish drama." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30714/.
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The completion of History as Theatrical Metaphor, now submitted for consideration for the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, represents an integration and culmination of a number of related strands arising from both my practice as a playwright over the last five decades and my relevant academic research. Susanne Kries has summarised a key approach underlying my writing of history plays as ‘deconstructing the ideological intent behind the very endeavour of writing history and of revealing the ways by which mythologies are formed’. Much of my related academic research shares this interest. A recurring theme of both playwriting and scholarly writing, central to the work submitted, is the significance of the interaction of drama, language – especially Scots and English – and history. The initial phase in exploring such themes was in my developing professional playwriting practice. In 1967, I wrote the first draft of Mary, eventually produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in 1977. In this first version I sought to address the theme of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, but in a revisionary way. The play’s first acts, before Mary arrives on stage, involved an unlikely affair between Mary of Guise, Queen Regent in Mary’s absence in France, and her Secretary of State, Maitland of Lethington, conceived as a cross between a Chief Minister and a Mafia consigliere, a relationship in which Mary of Guise achieved some form of Lawrentian ‘authentic’ sexual release and self-fulfilment through her relationship with a powerful Scots leader. This motif was developed when Mary arrived and proceeded to fall under the magnetic spell of the even more Lawrentian Bothwell, a transformation of her sexuality and identity marked by the fact that about half way through her scenes she stopped speaking in French-inflected English and started to speak in Scots. The play’s tendentiousness was further marked by its being written in Scots-language free verse. The decision to write in Scots was consciously, if superficially, ideological. It sought to reflect the vibrant language amongst which I grew up on a council scheme, although in my home the dominant language was Standard Scottish English. I also sought to take a revisionary view of Scottish history, seeking to avoid what I saw as the sentimentalisation of that history in plays by an older generation like that of Robert McLellan. What I was concerned to do was later outlined explicitly by Tom McGrath in a 1984 interview, talking of his own practice: I suppose at that time we were coming up with a different ideology. We were coming up with a different approach after all that work, work that had been done [by writers like MacDiarmid and McLellan] in Scots language. We were coming up with this street level sound of existentialist man in the street, "black man in the ghetto" type of writing. It just upset the applecart. (Later I would develop a contextual interpretation of the shift McGrath refers to, and which I sought to be part of, in arguing that the use of Scots on stage was key to supporting and enhancing the cultural prestige of Scots in the 2011 chapter, ‘Drama as a Means for Uphaudin Leid Communities’. This – in a continuing conscious intention to assert the potential and status of Scots – while academic in content, was written entirely in Scots.) In short, from the beginning of my professional playwriting, a key strand was experiment in and exploration of the relationship of drama, Scots language, community identity and history, particularly the interrogation of accepted versions of ‘history’. The first draft of Mary came by the early 1970s to seem to me to be unsatisfactory in its exploration of the interaction of drama, language and history. By then, it appeared in its sensationalist version of Scottish history to have fallen into a parallel trap to the earlier one of a sentimental and romanticised view of that history. It certainly had moved away from conventional treatments of Scotland’s past, but was rather tending to a simplistic dramatic interpretation pour épater les bourgeois. Indeed, its attempts at sexual directness made it unacceptable at that time, 1968-69, to the management of the Royal Lyceum. While its Literary Manager Alan Brown spoke positively of the play, he still felt the company could not present it. Within very few years my own view came to be that, while it might substitute a certain late-adolescent Scots-language raunchiness for earlier playwrights’ Scots-language sentimentalities, it was itself somewhat naïve and sentimental. Further, the use of Scots in a free verse form, rather than adding anything to the dramatic potential of Scots language, seemed to remove it from the everyday discourse which inspired me to use it in the first place. This change of critical perspective and creative intention arose from two related developments in my dramaturgy. One was the impact of a variety of late 1960s theatrical experiments which impressed me in dealing with historical and political material in a post-Shavian and post-Brechtian way. These included the 1964 film version of Peter Brook's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, which I saw in 1968, John Spurling's MacRune's Guevara (1969) and Peter Nichols's The National Health (1969) in the programme of the National Theatre in London, New York’s Negro Ensemble Company's version of Peter Weiss's The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, which is concerned with Portuguese colonial exploitation, presented in the 1969 London World Theatre Season, and John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's version of Horatio Nelson’s life and reputation, The Hero Rises Up, presented by Nottingham Playhouse at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival. I was further impressed by the theatrical techniques of the New York-based LaMama troupe, by its version of Paul Foster's Tom Paine (1967) and the popularised and commercialised exploitation of those techniques in Hair (1967). I had also read Foster's Heimskringla! Or The Stoned Angels (1970), written for LaMama and derived from Norse sagas. All employed varying metatheatrical techniques to deconstruct received versions of history and politics which extended my own understanding of what was creatively possible. The second development was that, as those plays affected my understanding of theatrical possibilities in exploring historically based themes, I was researching and beginning to draft my next play on a historical theme. This explored the life, business ethics and politics of Andrew Carnegie. On top of all of this, at this time, having showed Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, a first draft of Carnegie, begun during the autumn of 1969, I was invited by him to work, in my first professional theatre role, as a writing assistant on the first Traverse Workshop Theatre Company production, Mother Earth (1970), directed by Stafford-Clark when he ceased to be director of the Traverse itself. With his new company, he was developing the deconstructionist and improvisational rehearsal techniques that would later be more widely thought of as the creative method of his Joint Stock Theatre Company, into which the Traverse Workshop Company morphed in 1974. The dramaturgical lessons learned from the examples cited above and by working with such a creative and methodologically innovative director as Stafford-Clark were allied to my own quizzical view of Carnegie’s reputation. This was partly derived from the fact that my great-grandfather was a first cousin of Carnegie’s. There were family stories which, if they did not fully undermine his philanthropic reputation, suggested there were other sides to his career.
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Österberg, Robin. "Challenging tradition : Teaching English in Sweden without the influence of National Testing." Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Engelska, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-36876.
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When the Swedish school system met with the novel experience of cancelled the annual national tests in spring 2020, teachers across the country were forced to adapt to teaching without this traditional support. Due to English being one of the subjects required to administer national tests, upper secondary school English teachers were immediately affected. By looking at several studies regarding standardised testing in general, and Swedish national test tradition specifically, this qualitative study summarises how large-scale assessment in education affects teaching.Through semi-structured interviews with three English teachers, this study surveyed how teaching was affected by the cancellation of the national tests in Sweden. The teachers’ experiences of teaching without the supportive function of the national tests were also documented. The recorded interviews were analysed through the theoretical framework of reactivity, and specifically, Campbell’s Law. This study’s findings are that while the national tests hold a critical support function for teachers, they may also inhibit English teachers from teaching what is specified in the English curriculum. What emerged from the collected data and subsequent analysis was teachers’ fractured role as dependent on performance standards-based on test criteria rather than the content standards in the English curriculum. The interviewed teachers showed a great deal of trust in the national tests as grounds for assessing their students’ English skills, occasionally at the cost of their faith in themselves as teachers. Counterproductively, this resulted in teachers, consciously or not, adapting their teaching practices to fit the predicted national test rather than the curriculum. Essentially, teachers had changed their behaviour to accommodate an observer, as theorized by Campbell. During the 2020 spring semester when national tests were cancelled in Sweden, and English teachers all over the nation had to make do without their supporting function, this was made clear.
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Techawongstien, Koraya. "The sociology of the representation of national self through the translation of modern Thai literature into English : a Bourdieusian approach." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2016. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/23656/.
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Jabb, Lama. "Modern Tibetan literature and the inescapable nation." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dd216865-df8b-4973-b562-4e6dc3d525eb.
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Existing scholarship on modern Tibetan writing takes the 1980s as its point of “birth” and presents this period as marking a “rupture” with traditional forms of literature. This study seeks to go beyond such an interpretation by foregrounding the persistence of Tibet’s artistic past and oral traditions in the literary creativity of the present. An appreciation of genres, styles, concepts and techniques derived from Tibet’s rich and diverse oral art forms and textual traditions exposes the inadequacy of a simple “rupture” perspective. Whilst acknowledging the novel features of modern Tibetan literary creations this work draws attention to hitherto neglected aspects of continuities within the new. It reveals the innovative presence of Tibetan kāvya poetics, the mgur genre, biography, the Gesar epic and other types of oral compositions within modern Tibetan poetry and fiction. It also brings to prominence the complex and fertile interplay between orality and the Tibetan literary text. All these aspects are demonstrated by bringing the reader closer to Tibetan literature through the provision of original English translations of various textual and oral sources. Like any other national literature modern Tibetan literary production is also informed by socio-political and historical forces. An examination of unexplored topics ranging from popular music, Tibet’s critical tradition and cultural trauma to radical and erotic poetries shows a variety of issues that fire the imagination of the modern Tibetan writer. Of all these concerns the most overriding is the Tibetan nation, which pervades both fictional and poetic writing. In its investigation into modern Tibetan literature this thesis finds that Tibet as a nation - constituted of history, culture, language, religion, territory, shared myths and rituals, collective memories and a common sense of belonging to an occupied land - is inescapable. Embracing a multidisciplinary approach drawing on theoretical insights in literary theory and criticism, political studies, sociology and anthropology, this research demonstrates that, alongside past literary and oral traditions, the Tibetan nation proves to be an inevitable attribute of modern Tibetan literature.
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Maxedon, Tom. "A course portfolio, what is "Irishness?" : surveying Ireland's struggle to define a unified national identity, depicted in the country's literature from 1801-present." Virtual Press, 1996. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1027119.
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The purpose of this creative project was to advance scholarship in areas suffering a lack of attention by Ball State University. Exploring a broader scope of Irish writing than most theses would cover, this project could easily be incorporated by other universities which share Ball State's departmental impotence with regard to Irish literary studies. I chose a time frame of two-hundred years to focus attention for this course.My directed readings from my project chairperson and my research at the Dublin Writers Museum led me to the design of this hypothetical course in contemporary Irish Literary Studies. I chose texts from 1801-Present which examine the varied cultural assumptions that various sects of the Irish citizenry hold, as depicted in their literature. What I found is that as time progresses, the emphasis toward violent preservation of cultural identity increases literally. This portfolio maps out those assumptions via Irish literature.Department of English
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Avis, Robert John Roy. "The social mythology of medieval Icelandic literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2837907c-57c8-4438-8380-d5c8ba574efd.
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This thesis argues that the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature which pertains to Iceland contains an intertextual narrative of the formation of Icelandic identity. An analysis of this narrative provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between literature and identity, as well as the potency of the artistic use of the idea of the past. The thesis identifies three salient narratives of communal action which inform the development of a discrete Icelandic identity, and which are examined in turn in the first three chapters of the thesis. The first is the landnám, the process of settlement itself; the second, the origin and evolution of the law; and the third, the assimilation and adaptation of Christianity. Although the roots of these narratives are doubtless historical, the thesis argues that their primary roles in the literature are as social myths, narratives whose literal truth- value is immaterial, but whose cultural symbolism is of overriding importance. The fourth chapter examines the depiction of the Icelander abroad, and uses the idiom of the relationship between þáttr (‘tale’) and surrounding text in the compilation of sagas of Norwegian kings Morkinskinna to consider the wider implications of the relationship between Icelandic and Norwegian identities. Finally, the thesis concludes with an analysis of the role of Sturlunga saga within this intertextual narrative, and its function as a set of narratives mediating between an identity grounded in social autonomy and one grounded in literature. The Íslendingasögur or ‘family sagas’ constitute the core of the thesis’s primary sources, for their subject-matter is focussed on the literary depiction of the Icelandic society under scrutiny. In order to demonstrate a continuity of engagement with ideas of identity across genres, a sample of other Icelandic texts are examined which depict Iceland or Icelanders, especially when in interaction with non-Icelandic characters or polities.
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Phillips, George Micajah. "SEEING SUBJECTS: RECOGNITION, IDENTITY, AND VISUAL CULTURES IN LITERARY MODERNISM." UKnowledge, 2011. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_diss/221.
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Seeing Subjects plots a literary history of modern Britain that begins with Dorian Gray obsessively inspecting his portrait’s changes and ends in Virginia Woolf’s visit to the cinema where she found audiences to be “savages watching the pictures.” Focusing on how literature in the late-19th and 20th centuries regarded images as possessing a shaping force over how identities are understood and performed, I argue that modernists in Britain felt mediated images were altering, rather than merely representing, British identity. As Britain’s economy expanded to unprecedented imperial reach and global influence, new visual technologies also made it possible to render images culled from across the British world—from its furthest colonies to darkest London—to the small island nation, deeply and irrevocably complicating British identity. In response, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and others sought to better understand how identity was recognized, particularly visually. By exploring how painting, photography, colonial exhibitions, and cinema sought to manage visual representations of identity, these modernists found that recognition began by acknowledging the familiar but also went further to acknowledge what was strange and new as well. Reading recognition and misrecognition as crucial features of modernist texts, Seeing Subjects argues for a new understanding of how modernism’s formal experimentation came to be and for how it calls for responses from readers today.
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Thomas, Patricia A. "“Bury Your Head Between My Knees and Seek Pardon”: Gender, Sexuality, and National Conflict in John Okada’s No-No Boy." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2012. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1517.
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In “‘Bury Your Head Between My Knees and Seek Pardon’: Gender, Sexuality, and National Conflict in John Okada’s 1957 novel, No-No Boy,” I analyze the ways in which the complexities of gendered sexuality expressed by protagonist Ichiro Yamada intersect with post-World War II and Internment-era national identifications for American nisei. I demonstrate that this apparent story of one man’s pursuit to resolve his conflict over national identity is, in reality, a tour de force of literary subversion that not only destabilizes the subterfuge that surrounded internment but also—in its deliberate failure to resolve questions of national conflict on the basis of masculine and heterosexual norms—encourages skepticism about the larger structures of order that allowed internment to happen.
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Keller, Wolfram R. "Selves & nations : the Troy story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages." Heidelberg Winter, 2008. http://deposit.d-nb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=3059423&prov=M&dokv̲ar=1&doke̲xt=htm.
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Newton, Daniel W. "Death in the Royal Family: Victorian Funeral Sermon Techniques in Tennyson's National Poetry." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2008. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2480.pdf.
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Sundqvist, Amanda. "A Qualitative Textual Study: A Comparison of How the Democratic Mission of the School and English as a Lingua Franca Are Presented in the Finnish Curriculum for Åland and the Swedish National Curriculum." Thesis, Örebro universitet, Institutionen för humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-80220.
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This essay examines and compares how the Swedish national curriculum and the Finnish curriculum for Åland’s Lyceum present English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and the democratic mission of the school. This investigation is performed through a qualitative textual study with qualitative content analysis and by including influential aspects as political history, language planning, the perception of the concept of democracy, the perception of the concept of the fundamental values and tasks of the school, and the alignment with the European Framework of Reference for Languages. The hypothesis is that even though both curricula share the goal of preparing students for civic participation in a democratic society and ELF, their strategies differ.
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Bender, Ashley Brookner. "Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2009. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12081/.
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This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control of a character's props often accords a person control of the character to whom the props belong. Props consequently make visual the relationships of power and subjugation that exist among characters. The severed body parts, bodies, miniature portraits, and containers of these plays are the mechanisms by which characters attempt to differentiate themselves from others. The characters deploy objects as proof of their identities-for example, when the women in Behn's Rover circulate miniatures of themselves-yet other characters must also interpret these objects. The props, and therefore the characters' identities, are at all times vulnerable to misinterpretation. Much as the props' meanings are often disputed, so too are characters' private identities often at odds with their public personae. The boundaries of selfhood that the characters wish to protect are made vulnerable by the objects that they use to shore up those boundaries. When read in relation to the characters who move them, props reveal the negotiated process of individuation. In doing so, they emphasize the correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic worth. They are a measure of how well characters perform gender and class rolls, thereby demonstrating the importance of external signifiers in the legitimation of England's subjects, even as they expose "legitimacy" as a social construction.
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Glennon, Jenny L. "American ways and their meaning : Edith Wharton's post-war fiction and American history, ideology, and national identity." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:59954615-29ff-4da4-8632-b9887c24c218.
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This thesis argues that Edith Wharton’s assessment of American ways and their meaning in her post-war fiction has been widely misread. Its title derives from French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), which she wrote to educate her countrymen about French culture and society. Making sense of America was as great a challenge to Wharton. Much of her later fiction was for a long time dismissed by critics on the grounds that she had failed to ‘make sense’ of America. Wharton was troubled by American materialism and optimism, yet she believed in a culturally significant future for her nation. She advocated – and wrote – an American fiction that looked critically at society and acknowledged the nation’s ties to Europe. Sometimes her assessment of American ways is reductive, and presented in a tone that her critics, then and since, found off- putting and snobbish. But her skepticism about American modernity was penetrating and prophetic, and has not been given its due. In criticism over the last two decades, a case for the place of Wharton’s post-war fiction in canons of feminism and modernism has been persuasively made. The thesis responds to these positions, but makes its own argument that the post-war writing reflects broader shift in American identity and ideology. The thesis is broadly historicist in its strategy, opening with a discussionofthereputationofthesetextsandthatoftheauthormoregenerally. Afterthat entry-point, it is organized thematically, with four chapters covering topics that are seen as key components of American ideology in Wharton’s post-war writing. These include modernity, gender equality, the American Dream of social mobility, and American exceptionalism. The thesis concludes with an assessment of Wharton’s prognostications in the context of twenty-first century America.
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Hedengren, Mary L. "National Identity Transnational Identification: The City and the Child as Evidence of Identification Among the Poetic Elite." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2010. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3452.pdf.
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Johansson, Stephanie. "Decolonising Literature : Exclusionary Practices and Writing to Resist/Re-Exist." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Tema Genus, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-148985.
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This thesis examines elements of the conceptualization of literature within literary studies and literary production in a UK context, considering the concept of exclusionary practices based on the negligence of intersectional categories of identity such as race, gender, class, sexuality, etc., in the practice of understanding and interpreting literature. The methodologies I employ are close reading of various narratives, such as literary texts, as well as a narrative analysis aimed at a holistic understanding of my material. The second part of this thesis envisions a decolonised approach to literature in which we situate our positionalities when we read and interpret literary works. I demonstrate this through the analysis of several poems, informed by decolonial concepts and sensibilities. The results show that the maintenance of these exclusionary practices advances a grand-narrative of Western civilisation, ignoring the multiple sites people inhabit both from within, and outside, the West and that these practices are effectively harmful. I argue that through the project of decolonising literature there is a possibility of disrupting the perpetual macro-narrative of Western domination and universality.