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1
Hall, Simon W. "The history of Orkney literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2365/.
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The history of Orkney literature is the first full survey of the literature of the Orkney Islands. It examines fiction, non-fiction and poetry that is uncomplicatedly Orcadian, as well as that which has been written about Orkney by authors from outside the islands. Necessarily, the work begins with the great Icelandic chronicle Orkneyinga Saga. Literary aspects of the saga are examined, as well as its place within the wider sphere of saga writing. Most significantly, this study examines how the saga imposes itself on the work of subsequent writers. The book goes on to focua on the significance of Orkney and Orkney history in the work of a number of key nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures, including Sir Walter Scott, Edwin Muir, Eric Linklater, Robert Rendall and George Mackay Brown. The Victorian folklorist and short story writer Walter Traill Dennison is re-evaluated: The History of Orkney Literature demonstrates his central significance to the Orcadian tradition and argues for the relevance of his work to the wider Scottish canon. A fixation with Orkney history is common to all the writers considered herein. This preoccupation necessitates a detailed consideration of the core historiography of J. Storer Clouston. Other non-fiction works which are significant in the creation of this distinctly Orcadian literary identity include Samuel Laing's translation of Heimskringla; the polemical writings of David Balfour; and the historical and folklore studies of Ernest Walker Marwick. The study welcomes many writers into the fold, seeking to map and define a distinctly Orcadian tradition. This tradition can be considered a cousin of Scottish Literature. Although the writing of Orkney is a significant component of Scottish Literature at various historical stages, it nevertheless follows a divergent course. Both the eighteenth century Vernacular Revival and the twentieth century Literary Renaissance facilitate literary work in the islands which nevertheless remains distinctly independent in character. Indigenous Orcadian writers consider themselves to be Orcadians first and Scots or Britons second. Regardless of what they view as their national or political identity, their sense of insular cultural belonging is uniformly and pervasively Orcadian. What emerges is a robust, distinctive and very tight-knit minor literature.
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Talif, Rosli. "Teaching literature in ESL in a Malaysian context : (proposed INSET course designs for literature in ESL instruction)." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1991. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11560/.
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In view of the recent introduction of a literature component in the Malaysian English language teaching syllabus, this research study sets out to determine the present situation concerning the teaching of literature in ESL in Malaysia with particular reference to the Class Reader Programme (CRP). This is in order to develop two proposed course designs for the teaching of literature in ESL at the secondary school level with special emphasis on the Malaysian context. Under the present circumstances, this study offers an immediate response to the new developments and challenges brought about by the literature in ESL programmes especially when the Malaysian Education Ministry implemented the CRP at the Form One level in all secondary schools beginning from the 1989 academic year. The Ministry also plans to introduce the forthcoming Elective Literature in English Programme (ELEP) for the upper secondary level (Forms Four-Five) during the 1991-92 school session. These programmes aim to introduce the use of literary texts for language and literary purposes. This study is also in line with the current effort undertaken by the Department of Languages at the Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (UPM) to develop teaching literature in ESL courses for its pre- and in-service education and training (INSET) programme. Questionnaires were developed and used as the means for gathering the data in three separate surveys which were carried out for the purposes of this study. The three respective surveys were to investigate: (1) the Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (UPM) TESL in-service teachers' training to teach literature in ESL in Malaysia; (2) teachers' response to the CRP; and (3) teachers' response to the needs analysis of course components for teaching literature in ESL in Malaysia. In addition, separate interviews which involved two assistant directors from the Ministry of Education, Malaysia had also been undertaken to obtain further information pertaining to the aims and implementation procedures for the literature in ESL programmes (CRP and ELEP) at the secondary school level in Malaysia. The sample for this study consisted of 144 in-service teachers at UPM who were undergoing a four-year Bachelor of Education (B. Ed.) programme in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) and twenty-three Form One English language teachers from eleven selected rural and urban secondary schools in Malaysia who had been involved with the CRP. The outcome of this study primarily revealed that in the English language syllabus the respondents were not adequately prepared to teach the literature component; thereby, establishing the need for teaching literature in ESL courses in teacher education programmes in Malaysia. In relation to this finding, two proposed course designs which cater for the integrated language and literature teaching programmes in Malaysia (CRP and ELEP) were developed as an initial and practical response toward this undertaking. The two proposed courses are known as "Literature in ESL in the Language Class" and "Literature in ESL in the Literature Class”. Essentially, these two complementary courses promote the use of literary texts in the ESL classroom. Due consideration had been given to the following factors in the process of developing the two proposed courses: (1) the aims and objectives of the literature in ESL programmes in Malaysia (CRP and ELEP); (2) the results of the three empirical surveys which were conducted for the purposes of this study; (3) the review of the literature; and (4) the researcher's five years of practical experience in working with the Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESL) pre- and in-service teacher training and development programme at UPM. It is hoped that the results of this study will have some implications for future considerations on teaching literature in ESL courses, particularly in Malaysia, and also provide some basic principles and directions for future research in the area. More importantly, this initial effort should be regarded as a primary attempt to address the inadequacy of courses on methodology in the teaching of literature in ESL in the Malaysian teacher education curriculum. It may also serve as a practical guide to those who are interested in understanding more about the nature of literature teaching in ESL in general and in the Malaysian context in particular.
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Saunders, Rosalyn. "The monster within : emerging monstrosity in Old English literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4166/.
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This thesis examines representations of monstrosity in Old English literature. The literary studies herein examine the construction of monstrous individuals in Old English poetry, and I demonstrate that literary monstrous types converge and develop a tradition of monstrosity that informs the monsters of the Liber monstrorum and Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East. I argue that, for Old English writers, a monster was not necessarily a deformed being located in the distant lands of the East; rather, the literary and linguistic evidence suggests that any man or woman had the potential to become a monstrous type within the conventional social order. The Old English works examined are Precepts, Maxims I and II, Vainglory, Judith, The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf because each text reveals that Old English writers utilised binary sex and gender differences to define the social roles and behaviours appropriate for the masculine and feminine. According to critical theory, gender is a performance and both men and women must therefore prove their gender identities by behaving in a certain way and fulfilling the roles deemed appropriate for their gender. In failing to conform to the expectations of their gender, a gender-monstrosity matrix works upon the social transgressors, excluding them from the social order and distorting their gender identities into a monstrously confused yet recognisable construct. In the literary works examined, the monstrous type is not only the antithesis to the idealised masculine and feminine, but is also a malevolent figure whose anti-social words and actions transgress gender expectations. I demonstrate that the danger posed by the monster is not only physical, but also psychological. The monster threatens the communal harmony of the social order because, in Old English literature, monstrosity emerges in the form of an uncontrolled riot that incites unrest and enmity in the hall, or as words and outward actions that are purposely deployed (or withheld) in order to demoralise, destroy, and even consume the masculine symbolic order in the pursuit of self-gratification.
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Brljak, Vladmir. "Allegory and modernity in English literature c. 1575-1675." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/73270/.
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The thesis examines the place of allegory in the literature and intellectual culture of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, especially in its complex and contested relationship to the notion of the period’s (early) modernity. What is modernity’s quarrel with allegory? Why does it run so deep in Western thought, and why has it remained with us to the present day? What specific forms does this quarrel assume in the literary culture of the period now commonly designated as “early modern”? Why has allegory, under its many names, remained a point of differentiation and dispute between various sets of ancients and moderns even into our – some would say “postmodern” – times? Even as scholarship on allegory grows increasingly comprehensive and sophisticated, commentary on these issues has remained sporadic and inconclusive, and the thesis seeks to provide a more focused and comprehensive examination of the subject than has thus far been available. In terms of its format, the thesis pursues with these concerns through three chapters – on “Allegory and Poetics”, “Allegory and Drama”, and “Allegory and Epic” – preceded by an Introduction on “Allegory and Modernity”, and followed by an Afterword on “(Neo)allegory and (Anti)modernity”. The Introduction and Afterword discuss the broader questions raised by the allegory-modernity problem, and thus constitute a polemical frame for the three “case studies” on poetics, drama, and epic, which engage particular sixteenth- and seventeenth century texts and traditions. These range from such canonical staples as Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Milton’s Paradise Lost to numerous other, less well known, but no less important works. In reconsidering the place of allegory in this corpus, the thesis is primarily intended as a contribution to English literary and intellectual history. On a broader level, it is also intended as a contribution to the more comprehensive project of “allegory studies”: the emergent nexus of interdisciplinary scholarship tackling those comprehensive and fundamental issues raised by the phenomenon of allegory which transcend particular discipline-, period-, or author-focused contexts. The thesis thus hopes to demonstrate the signal importance of the allegory-modernity problem in any advanced understanding of the Western allegorical tradition, at the same time as it sheds new light on what is in many ways the most important and most contested period – apart from our own, perhaps – in the history of this tradition.
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Fisher, Marianne. "Nobility in Middle English romance." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2013. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/54052/.
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Medieval nobility was a compound and fluid concept, the complexity of which is clearly reflected in the Middle English romances. This dissertation examines fourteen short verse romances, grouped by story-type into three categories. They are: type 1: romance and lost heirs (Degaré Chevelere Assigne, Sir Perceval of Galles, Lybeaus Desconus, and Octvian); type 2: romances about winning a bride (Floris and Blancheflour, The Erle of Tolous, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Degrevant, and the Amis-Belisaunt plot from Amis and Amiloun); type 3: romances of improversihed knights (Amiloun's story from Amis and Amiloun, Sir Isumbras, Sir Amadace, Sir Cleges, and Sir Launfal). The analysis is based on contextualized close reading, drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. The results show that Middle English romance has no standard criteria for defining nobillity, but draws on the full range of contemporary opinion; understandings of nobility conflict both between and within texts. Ideological consistence is seldom a priority, and the genre apparently serves neither a single socio-political agenda, nor a single socio-political group. The dominant conception of nobility in each romance is determined by the story-type. Romance type 1 presents nobility as inherent in the blood, type 2 emphasizes prowess and force of will, and type 3 concentrates on virtue. However, no romance text offers just one definition; implicitly or explicitly, there are always alternatives. This internal variety indicates tha the romances imagine nobility scene-by-scene; even a text seemingly committed to one perspective is liable to abandon it temporarily if there is another better suited to the narrative moment. Ideological expression always comes second to effective story-telling. This means the texts are frequently inconsistent and sometimes illogical, but that multiplicity is of their very essence.
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Smith, William Leon. "Torontos : representations of Toronto in contemporary Canadian literature." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/14507/.
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This thesis examines how representations of Toronto in contemporary Canadian literature engage with place and further an understanding of spatial innovation in literature. Acknowledging the Canadian critical tradition of discussing place and space, the thesis moves the focus away from conventional engagements with wilderness motifs and small town narratives. In this way the thesis can be seen to respond to the nascent critical movement that urges engagement with contemporary urban spaces in Canadian literature. Responding to the critical neglect of urban representation, and more particularly, representations of Toronto in Canadian literary criticism, this thesis examines Toronto as a complex and contradictory site of symbolic power across critical, political and popular discourses. Furthermore, this thesis repositions an understanding of Toronto by paying attention to literary texts which depict the city's negotiation of national, local and global forces. The thesis seeks to understand the multiplicity of the city in lived, perceived and conceived forms - seeing Toronto as Torontos. Questioning existing frameworks deployed in Canadian literary criticism, the thesis develops a unique methodology with which to approach the complex issues involved in literary writing about place, drawing on contemporary Canadian criticism and transnational approaches to critical literary geography. The central chapters focus on four texts from the twenty-first century, three novels and one collection of poetry, approaching each text with a critically informed spatial lens in order to draw out how engagements with Toronto develop spatial innovation within literature. The thesis analyses how engaging with Toronto challenges writers to experiment with literary form. In turn the thesis seeks to elucidate the spatial developments achieved through literary writing. The thesis then demonstrates an understanding of the material geography of the city, situating readings with reference to interview material from parties involved in writing, producing and distributing literary depictions of Toronto. Hence it combines traditional literary criticism with a spatially and socially engaged criticism, in order to clearly address the literary geographies of Torontos.
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Boucher, Abigail Kate. "Representations of the aristocratic body in Victorian literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7059/.
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This thesis examines the representations of the aristocratic body in Victorian literature. This thesis argues that the authors often wrote, coded, and interpreted an aristocrat’s physical form as a paradoxical object which reflected many of the complex interclass issues and socio-economic transitions seen throughout the Victorian era. By exploring distinct, sequential genres and types of ‘popular’ fiction in this dissertation, I investigate a broad-spectrum literary treatment of aristocratic bodies as cultural paradoxes: for the same usage of the aristocratic body to crop up again and again in disparate, discrete, and hugely popular forms of literature speaks to the nineteenth-century resonance of the aristocratic body as a codeable symbol and textual object. I use what is termed ‘popular fiction’: fiction largely excluded from the canon, yet with a very large contemporary readership and authors or genres which continued to be widely read immediately following the publication of those individual texts. Popular fiction is, by its very nature, the type of literature that can most reasonably be considered to represent the general, broad-spectrum views of large populations, and in doing so these texts can be used to determine wide-scale desires, anxieties, and expectations surrounding the subjects they contain. Body theory and gaze theory serve as the overarching foundation for exploring the portraiture of aristocratic characters by authors from all classes, although individual chapters deal with their own theoretic approaches to the texts examined within them. Chapter 1 on silver fork fiction from the 1820s to the 1840s uses socio-economic theory, including Bourdieu’s idea of habitus to examine the genre’s treatment of aristocratic bodies as consumer goods and luxury products, which in turn reflected contemporary shifts in social and economic class hegemony. Chapter 2 on G.W.M. Reynolds’s radical 1840s to 1850s serial, The Mysteries of the Court of London, uses the medical humanities and masculinity theory to investigate the text’s endemic infertility in aristocratic men; Reynolds uses the biology of aristocratic male bodies as the locus for moralistic discussions about primogeniture and politics. Chapter 3 on the sensation fiction of Mrs Henry (Ellen Price) Wood utilises feminist theory to illustrate Wood’s portrayal of female aristocrats as bodiless, and yet continually gazed upon; Wood uses the aristocratic female body as a magnifying glass to depict the nineteenth-century female experience, in particular the paradoxes of adhering to private, domestic ideologies while at the same time fulfilling the requirements of the public gaze. Chapter 4 explores the influence of evolutionary theory upon two sister-genres of the fin de siècle Medieval Revival: Ruritanian fiction in Part 1 and a genre I have named the Evolutionary Feudal in Part 2. In Part 1, the aristocratic body is represented as outside of evolution; the genre provides escapism from Darwinism and fin de siècle anxieties of history and (d)evolution by whitewashing the feudal era and subscribing to Thomas Carlyle’s theories of divinely- or cosmically-appointed leaders. Part 2 focuses on texts which depict a post-apocalyptic world returning to a feudal Dark Age, and in which aristocratic bodies are seen evolving or devolving; rather than whitewashing history, the Evolutionary Feudal locates history’s darkest origins in the aristocratic body as a way of predicting possible futures and coping with the concerns of degeneration.
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Cavill, Paul. "Maxims in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1996. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11063/.
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The focus of the thesis is on maxims and gnomes in Old English poetry, but the occasional occurrence of these forms of expression in Old English prose and in other Old Germanic literature is also given attention, particularly in the earlier chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 are general, investigating a wide range of material to see how and why maxims were used, then to define the forms, and distinguish them from proverbs. The conclusions of these chapters are that maxims are ‘nomic’, they organise experience in a conventional, authoritative fashion. They are also ‘proverbial’ in the sense of being recognisable and repeatable, but they do not have the fixed form of proverbs. Chapters 4 to 7 are more specific in their focus, applying techniques from formulaic theory, paroemiology and the sociology of knowledge to the material so as to better understand how maxims are used in their contexts in the poems, and to appreciate the nature and function of the Maxims collections. The conclusions reached here are that the maxims in Beowulf 183b-88 are integral to the poem, that maxims in The Battle of Maldon show how the poet manipulated the social functions of the form for his own purposes, that there is virtually no paganism in Old English maxims, and that the Maxims poems outline and illustrate an Anglo-Saxon world view. The main contribution of the thesis is that it goes beyond traditional commentary in analysing the purpose and function of maxims. It does not merely focus on individual poems, but attempts to deal with a limited aspect of the Old English oral and literary tradition. The primary aim is to understand the general procedures of the poets in using maxims and compiling compendia of them, and then to apply insights gained from theoretical approaches to the specifics of poems.
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Evans, Dewi. "Ideas of books and reading in literature, 1880-1914." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2012. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/41976/.
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This thesis elucidates some of the ways in which concerns about the status of ‘the book’ at the end of the nineteenth century both inform and are, in turn, informed by the representation of books in the period’s fiction. Focusing on the work of Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, M.R. James and E.M. Forster, I argue that their fiction places a discursive ‘idea’ of the book at the centre of a range of socio-political debates in which literary texts participate and which they also help to shape. In particular, I argue that the fragmentation of dominant nineteenth-century print-cultural institutions forms an important context for these authors’ preoccupation with the ability of the written word to refract ideas and experiences it purports accurately to reflect. In Wilde’s work, for example, books are simultaneously the facilitators of panoptic surveillance and sites upon which, by asserting their right to a wholly subjective interpretation of text, readers can resist such surveillance. Stevenson’s adventure fiction is underscored by similar anxieties about the insidious formative influence of fiction – anxieties that lead him to adopt a range of metafictional strategies, designed to draw the reader’s attention to the book as the product of a specific marketplace. James and Forster’s fiction goes further, using books as the symbol of a wider epistemological crisis that underscores turn-of-the-century reading practices. Ultimately all four writers reject, in different ways, a utilitarian conception of books as repositories for knowledge about the world, to which readers’ own subjectivities must become subordinate in order to ensure a ‘right’ reading. Instead, they foreshadow modern reader response theory, presenting books as sites upon which ‘ideas’ – the product of a dynamic interaction between text and reader – are continually shaped and reshaped as they circulate within the ideologically-charged materiality of a particular historical moment.
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Woolner, Victoria Evelyn. "Scottish romanticism and its impact on early Canadian literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5071/.
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This research considers the impact of Scottish romanticism on the construction of literary identity in the Canadas prior to Confederation (1867). I argue that early Scottish dominance in literary Canada, and similarities faced by both countries in defining a sense of self—including participation in a wider empire (or Union), populations divided by language and religion, and the need for a distinct identity in the face of a dominant neighbour to the south—all contributed to a tendency on the part of Canadians to look to Scotland as a model. Through an examination of early Canadian literature and on-going British constructions of the colony, the thesis considers the manner in which Scottish romantic strategies of literary nationalism are deployed and manipulated in the process of articulating a Canadian identity. Particular attention is paid to the works of John Galt and Major John Richardson, while tropes examined include the construction of landscape and settlement narratives, stadial histories, the historical novel, national tale and the depiction of a national history, and the manipulation of a romanticised Scottish military past in constructing Canadian history.
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Allen, J. "A search for the Metamorphic Text : human animal transformation in twentieth century literature." Thesis, Bath Spa University, 2013. http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/1883/.
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Mansfield, Katherine. "Sensationalising the New Woman : crossing the boundaries between sensation and New Woman literature." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2018. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/120186/.
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My thesis seeks to conceptualise and explore the relationship between Sensation and New Woman fiction, two popular genres of the mid- to late-Victorian era, to investigate the extent to which Sensation literature is a forerunner to the early development of the New Woman novel; and consequently how the two genres blur, or cross, temporal and conceptual boundaries. Both genres challenged prevailing attitudes to gender, sexuality, morality and domesticity: Sensation fiction more implicitly by making the erstwhile Angel of the House the agent of domestic and marital upheaval and even crime, New Woman fiction explicitly by making the rebel of the house the rebel in society; here, she was more often positioned within the larger socio-economic setting for which her rebellion could have dramatic consequences. While previous comparisons of the two genres (although they are limited in number) have focused solely on the crossovers between the female protagonists, I seek to extend existing scholarship by investigating the relationship between Sensation and New Woman fiction through the two genres' response to contemporary legal and social debates, the characters, both female and male, Gothic literature, a mode both genres revisited, and their subversive endings. I argue that it is in challenging Victorian ideologies that Sensation and New Woman literature obscure and, to a certain extent, redefine genre paradigms.
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Rooney, Lee. "Prophecy in Shakespeare's English history cycles." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2014. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/2003748/.
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Prophecy — that is, the action of foretelling or predicting the future, particularly a future thought to represent the will of God — is an ever-present aspect of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a reading of the dramas of Shakespeare’s English history cycles — from 1 Henry VI to Henry V — that focuses exclusively upon the role played by prophecy in representing and reconstructing the past. It seeks to show how, through close attention to the moments when prophecy emerges in these historical dramas, we might arrive at a different understanding of them, both as dramatic narratives and as meditations on the nature of history itself. As this thesis seeks to demonstrate, moreover, Shakespeare’s treatment of prophecy in any one play can be viewed, in effect, as a key that can take us to the heart of that drama’s wider concerns. The comparatively recent conception of a body of historical plays that are individually distinct and no longer chained to the Tillyardian notion of a ‘Tudor myth’ (or any other ‘grand narrative’) has freed prophecy from effectively fulfilling the rather one-dimensional role of chorus. However, it has also raised as-yet-unanswered questions about the function of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English history cycles, which this thesis aims to consider. One of the key arguments presented here is that Shakespeare utilises prophecy not to emphasise the pervasiveness of divine truth and providential design, but to express the political, narratorial, and interpretative disorder of history itself. It is also argued that any conception of the English history plays that rejects homogeneity and even consistency must also acknowledge that prophecy, as a form of historical narrative in essence, cannot be expected to manifest itself in the same ways in each drama throughout Shakespeare’s career. In this sense, the purpose of this thesis is to show that Shakespeare not only uses ‘prophecy’ to construct ‘history’: as a dramatist, he also thinks through ‘prophecy’, in various ways and from multiple perspectives, in order to intensify and complicate our sense of the complexity and drama of history itself. This thesis treats the English chronicle plays in order of composition and performance. While the Introduction contextualizes concepts of prophecy in the early modern period, and its relationship to history in particular, chapters 1–3 address the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with chapters 4 and 5 examining Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV. Henry V is addressed in the Conclusion. The inclusion of the second cycle of histories, rarely interrogated by critics in relation to prophecy, is crucial to the approach taken by this thesis. Unlike previous studies, this thesis privileges prophecy in both the earlier and the later histories, not least because its perceived absence from the plays of the second cycle is capable of informing our understanding of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy more generally. What is at stake in this reading of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English histories, both locally in the plays themselves and more generally across the cycles, are questions of causality, identity (both personal and national), monarchy, and the art of theatre itself.
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Carruthers, Gerard Charles. "The invention of Scottish literature during the long eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1181/.
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"The invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century" examines the limited place in the canon traditionally allowed to creative writing in Scotland during this period and the overarching reading of creative impediment applied to it in the light of Scotland's fraught and not easily to be homogenised national history and identity. It interrogates the dominant mode of what it terms the Scottish literary critical tradition and funds this tradition to have many shortcomings as a result of its prioritising of literary and cultural holism. In examining the Scots poetry revival of the eighteenth century the thesis challenges the traditional identification of a populist and beset mode, and finds eighteenth-century poetry in Scots to be actually much more catholic in its literary connections. These more catholic "British" connections are reappraised alongside the distinctively Scottish accents of the poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. The poetry of James Thomson, it is also argued, fits more easily into a heterogeneous Scottish identity than is sometimes thought and the work of Thomson is connected with the poets in Scots to show a network of influence and allegiance which is more coherent than has been traditionally allowed. Similarly, the primitivist agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment in creative literature is examined to demonstrate the way in which this provides license for reclaiming elements of the historically fraught or "backward" Scottish identity (thus an essentially conservative, patriotic element within the Scottish Enlightenment cultural voice is emphasised.). Also, with the writers of poetry in Scots, as well as with Thomson, and with those whose work comes under the intellectual sponsorship of Enlightenment primitivism such as Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson, James Beattie and others we chart a movement from the age of Augustanism and neoclassicism to that of sensibility and proto-Romanticism. From Burns' work to that of Walter Scott, John Galt and James Hogg we highlight Scottish writers making creative capital from the difficult and fractured Scottish identity and seeing this identity, as, in part, reflecting cultural tensions and fractures which are more widely coined furth of their own country. The connecting threads of the thesis are those narratives in Scottish literature of the period which show the retrieval and analysis of seemingly lost or receding elements of Scottish identity. Creative innovation and re-energisation rather than surrender and loss are what the thesis finally diagnoses in Scottish literature of the long eighteenth century.
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Dean, Dominic. "The child and authority in contemporary literature and critical culture." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/87250/.
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This thesis explores representations of the child in contemporary literature, culture, and criticism. The authors and texts considered are primarily British and post-1979, but the thesis situates them within the context of post-war cultural history, and particularly in relation to changes to perceptions of the ‘post-war’ itself in the 1980s. From these texts, representations of the child that dramatise the child’s entrance into authority as a problem for the adult, one characterised by symbolic or actual violence, ground a case that the child is required to correlate with a recognisable image of himself, one that actually limits his political potential, as the condition for his political or aesthetic representation. Violence against the child is the all-pervasive threat for failure to meet this condition. Reading these depictions of violence towards the child, notably by Alan Hollinghurst, Ian McEwan, Peter Ackroyd, and Kazuo Ishiguro, this thesis builds upon existing critical work on the child as a current and continuing problem for authority. The theoretical framework derives from cultural history, from the political theory of Hannah Arendt, and from psychoanalysis, particularly as mediated through contemporary Queer Studies. This range positions literary authors as sometimes mediating between psychoanalytic understandings of the child and the political use of the child as representation of the future, a connection already central to the work of seminal contemporary theorists such as Lee Edelman. The thesis argues that we face a historically specific and psychoanalytically resonant problem of the child and authority: a problem demanding attention to the way we read the child, and with broader implications for reading as the practice of literary analysis and interpretation (one with, as we shall find, a complicated relation to how political authorities require particular ‘readings’ of the child). Several texts discussed here constitute not only uncanny versions of cultural history, but also interventions against their own reading. These dramatise and resist a pronounced tendency to demand that the child becomes available for recognition, as the condition for its political and aesthetic representation, with violence ensuing for the child who refuses to meet this condition.
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Chen, Chi-Fang. "A study of political humour in British literature in the 1790s." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/92285/.
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British responses to the French Revolution are characterised by humorous expression in the literature of the 1790s. Yet political humour is often not readily harnessed to an immediate political agenda. ‘Political humour’ as an idea appears to be a contradiction and elicits a contradictory set of epithets, which falls into two distinct categories: ideological commitment and disinterested amusement. This thesis argues that it is this tension that contributes to the redrawing of the ambit of politics. This thesis continues the recent scholarly approach to the British response to the Revolution less as a formal ‘debate’ than as a ‘controversy’, which involves a diversity of cultural practices and experimentation of expression and social organisation. I argue that the employment of humour in the political literature of the 1790s provides extended or alternative means of political engagement. The political humour goes beyond topical political agendas and alludes to the eighteenth-century comic theory, which instructs ethical questions about social relation or ways of life. I demonstrate that the claim to autotelic innocence of humour in the comic discourse of the eighteenth century was predicated on contradictory social tendencies: laughing either reinforces individual boundary or facilitates transmissive and collective conviviality. ‘Common life’, which denotes a social relation in settlement, is the existential horizon that enacts this contradiction. With ‘common life’ in crisis or contestation in the 1790s, and with social organisation under political controversy, humour as political disclaimer is thereby reworked into a particular political language. I read the comic discourses of Burke and the popular radicals, the satire of Peter Pindar, and the comic rhetoric of the anti-Jacobin novels to explore this political language. In doing so, this thesis seeks to suggest ways of reading the literary culture of the 1790s in terms of the circumscription or expansion of the scope of political life, so as to examine how humour contributed and responded to changes in political culture.
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Hughes, Christopher. "Five Middle English alliterative poems : their versification, rhetoric and authorship." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2018. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/111228/.
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The Awntyrs off Arthure (Awntyrs), The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain (Gologras), Rauf the Collier (Rauf), The Pistel of Swete Susan (Susan) and The Buke of the Howlat (Howlat), five fourteenth and fifteenth-century alliterative poems in rhyming stanzas, are the subjects of a stylistic analysis using a novel methodology. The aims of the analysis are threefold: (i) to reappraise the structure of Awntyrs and provide more evidence than hitherto has been offered for the work originally to have been two poems by different authors; (ii) to provide more securely evidenced data to evaluate the various claims made in nineteenth and twentieth-century criticism for shared authorships between Awntyrs, Gologras, Rauf and Susan; (iii) to demonstrate how, and with what motives, Richard Holland composed his only known poem, Howlat. From the studies of the authorship claims, a proposal is developed that Gologras and specifically the second episode of Awntyrs are more closely related than hitherto described. The methodology considers such elements of literary style as attention to strophic paradigms, syntax, narrative technique and rhetoric. The study of rhetorical style in non-Chaucerian fourteenth and fifteenth-century poetry seems to have been neglected but proves to contribute significantly to an understanding of the stylistic characteristics of the poems that are the subjects this thesis. The rhetorical study of Howlat reveals the extent to which its author followed the teachings of a classical rhetorician when composing his fable and modelled its central panegyric on traditional praise poetry. The thesis demonstrates how the methodology exploits the complex versification of these poems to study the literary style and ability of their authors, and invites its future application to a study of all the extant alliterative thirteen-line stanza poems.
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Lamont, Craig Ronald. "Georgian Glasgow : the city remembered through literature, objects, and cultural memory theory." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7041/.
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The core argument under discussion in this thesis is that Georgian Glasgow (1714-1837) has been largely overshadowed by the city’s unprecedented growth in the following centuries when it became a symbol of the industrial age. In this sense much of the work being done here is a form of cultural excavation: unearthing neglected histories from the past that tell us more than is presently known about the development of Glasgow. The thesis will engage with literature, history, and memory studies: a collective approach that allows for both general discussion of ideas as well as specific engagement with literature and objects. The larger issues to which these converging disciplines will be applied include the Scottish Enlightenment, religion, cultural identity, slavery, and diaspora. The thesis is developed chronologically through the Georgian period with contextual discussions of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries at each stage. This results in a more rounded analysis of each theme while making the argument that Georgian Glasgow remains underrepresented in the public realm. The main historical figures that help this argument are: Robert and Andrew Foulis; Tobias Smollett; Adam Smith and James Boswell; and John Galt. Each of these main figures represent distinct themes that define the case studies of the argument. They are: print culture and religion; science and medicine; slavery; and transatlantic migration and colonisation. There are crossovers, for instance the points made about religion in chapter one may be utilised again in chapters two and four; while the very broad theme of the Scottish Enlightenment is discussed to varying degrees in every chapter. The methodology strives to discuss literary, historical, and theoretical memory studies together. In the latter field, the theories of the pre-eminent scholars underpin the case studies of people, places, and objects. Given the connection of this thesis to the major Glasgow Life exhibition, How Glasgow Flourished: 1714-1837 (2014), this interdisciplinary approach is able to reflect the public response to ‘Georgian Glasgow.’ The majority of these findings are revealed in the conclusion chapter, although the experience of working collaboratively with Glasgow Museums informed the thesis as a whole. While this thesis primarily aims to recover and engage with the forgotten aspects of Glasgow’s past, it is also shaped as a methodological template transferrable to other places and time periods. By engaging with the specialisms of academia and taking them into the public realm via other institutions, this thesis strives to remember Georgian Glasgow while outlining a practical process for cultural engagement elsewhere.
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Gordon, Sharon Rosamunde. "Representations of feminist and lesbian consciousness and the use of subversive strategies in selected poetry of Isabella Jane Blagden (1817-1873)." Thesis, Edinburgh Napier University, 2016. http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/453489.
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The purpose of this study is to recover and revise the contribution made to women's writing by the English minor novelist and poet, Isabella Jane Blagden (1817-1873), who was the centrifugal force of an influential literary and artistic milieu in Italy, in the mid-nineteenth-century. Key figures in the group were the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and the American writer, Henry James. This study is a revisionist critique which questions the prevailing masculine discourse and conventions which oppressed women in terms of their sexual, political and economicfreedom. This, therefore, fits into the Victorian phenomenon of women poets finding their own space and expression against patriarchal norms. My focus on Blagden's poetry, with its scope for liminal/subliminal suggestiveness, enables an explorationof her subversive and transgressive feminist-lesbian poetics. Recent contributions from feminist and lesbian theorists and critics, are examined in order to establish a feminist-lesbian interpretation of gender, sexuality, subversion and transgression. A secondary consideration is Blagden's role in the aesthetic consciousness of others and her apparent inspirational position at the centre of the creative groups of intellectual emigrės in her circle. While most of her friends and acquaintances had a public persona, Blagden did not, and her work has received little discussion anddebate. In order to ensure her significance as a feminist-lesbian poet and Muse, this study will focus on her contribution to nineteenth-century women's poetry. As a contribution to literary scholarship my aim is to bring Blagden in from the margins asa poet of non-canonical status, to one whose status is placed firmly within the continuous literary tradition of radical feminist-lesbian women writers in the nineteenth century.
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Wright, L. S. "'Iron on iron': Modernism engaging apartheid in some South African Railway Poems." Routledge, 2011. http://eprints.ru.ac.za/2208/1/Iron_on_Iron_for_ESiA.pdf.
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Abstract
Modernism tends to be criticised, internationally, as politically conservative. The objection is often valid, although the charge says little about the quality of artistic achievement involved. This article argues that the alliance between Modernism and political conservatism is by no means a necessary one, and that there are instances where modernist vision has been used to convey substantive political insight, effective social critique and solid resistance. To illustrate the contrast,the article juxtaposes the abstract Modernism associated with Ben Nicholson and World War 2, with a neglected strain of South African railway poetry which uses modernist techniques to effect a powerful critique of South Africa’s apartheid
dispensation. The article sustains a distinction between universalising modernist art that requires ethical work from its audiences to achieve artistic completion, and art in which modernist vision performs the requisite ethical work within its own formal constraints. Four very different South African railway poems, by Dennis Brutus, John Hendrickse, Alan Paton, and Leonard Koza, are examined
and contextualised to demonstrate ways in which a modernist vision has been used to portray the social disruptions caused by apartheid. Modernist techniques are used to turn railway experience into a metonym for massive social disruption,without betraying the social reality of the transport technology involved.
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Thomas, Alun Deian. "The making and remaking of history in Shakespeare's History Plays." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2012. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/42105/.
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History is a problem for the history plays. The weight of ‘true’ history, of fact, puts pressure on the dramatic presentation of history. Not fiction and not fact, the plays occupy the interstitial space between these opposites, the space of drama. Their position between the binary opposites of fact and fiction allows the history plays to play with history. They view history as a problem to be solved, and the different ways in which each play approaches the problem of history gives us a glimpse of how they attempt to engage and deal with the problem of creating dramatic history. Each history play rewrites the plays that preceded it; the plays present ‘history’ as fluid and shifting as competing narratives and interpretations of the past come into conflict with each other, requiring the audience to act as historians in order to construct their own narrative of events. In this way the plays dramatise the process of remaking history. This can be seen in the relationship between the two parts of Henry IV, which restage the same narrative in a different emotional key, and the way that Henry IV’s retelling of the events of Richard II from his own perspective at the conclusion of 1 Henry IV forces the audience to re-evaluate the events of the earlier play, reinterpreting the dramatic past and imaginatively rewriting the play in light of the new perspective gained on events. The history plays thus create a new, dramatic history, a history without need for historical precedent. The plays deliberately signal their departure from ‘fact’ through anachronism, deviation from chronicle history and wholesale dramatic invention. In this sense the plays deliberately frustrate audience expectations; knowledge of chronicle history does not provide foreknowledge of what will happen onstage. History in the theatre is new and unpredictable, perhaps closer in spirit to the uncertainty of the historical moment rather than the reassuring textual narrative of the chronicles.
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Murdoch, Christina. "'A large and passionate humanity plays about her' : women and moral agency in the late Victorian social problem novel." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2012. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3703/.
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This thesis examines responses to the idea of a specific female moral agency in depictions of women’s philanthropic work by late nineteenthcentury female novelists. Focusing on depictions of romantic and sexual female experience in the late nineteenth-century campaign against poverty, I explore the role of gender and sexuality in the making of the female moral self in novels by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Iota, Margaret Harkness, Jane Hume Clapperton, Gertrude Dix. I demonstrate the manner in which altruism was linked to romantic love and sexual desire, and show how this idea surfaced in the love-plot in novels by late nineteenth-century women. I argue that the novel was regarded as a valuable instrument to further the process of social reform, owing to its perceived unique ability to arouse the reader’s sympathies; therefore, these novelists used the novel as a tool for constructing the altruistic self. Reading the novels alongside contemporary non-fiction discourse, I undertake an analysis of different romance plots and show how they relate to the debates of the social reform movement of the late nineteenth century. Finally, I suggest that by using the novel, and especially the romance plot, which was regarded as a feminine form of expression, these novelists are defending the idea of a feminine ethic, and a feminine conception of morality that was defined by emotion, feeling, and sympathy, as opposed to the more masculine scientific and sociological ideas behind the late nineteenth century social reform movement.
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Mushakavanhu, Tinashe. "Anarchies of the mind : a contrapuntal reading of the poetry and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dambudzo Marechera." Thesis, University of Kent, 2017. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/69686/.
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The thesis examines the historical and contemporary engagements of philosophical anarchism in the selected writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dambudzo Marechera in a bid to establish an anarchic poetics that emerges between them. Both use poetry and prose to express opposition to values and relations characterising authoritarian societies while also expressing alternative social, political and personal values. The unusual pairing of two writers who wrote and lived in very different times inevitably prompts an enquiry into the various trajectories of philosophical anarchism, Romanticism and postcoloniality in world literature. The aim is to blur the stereotypical nature of writers and writings from specific regions of the world and instead argue for an interliterary and intertextuality tradition as the new critical idiom. This thesis also analyses the social functioning of poetry and fiction in social reform and political revolution. Juxtaposing the perspectives of and writings from different spatio- temporal and cultural locations is necessary to emphasise the continuity of ideas, the evolution of theory and philosophy and the historical interconnectedness of humanity as explained by Edward Said's notion of 'contrapuntal juxtaposition.' The writings of Shelley and Marechera do raise important questions about society and the state and continue to address serious political issues. As will be demonstrated, the literature of Shelley and Marechera is not static, it grows and develops with each new reading, it is continually changing, and for this reason it is essentially moving. This study contributes to the fields of literary anarchist theory, postcolonialism as well as Romantic studies by extending a conceptual bridge between the political and literary histories of ideas in which Shelley and Marechera are both ambassadors.
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Macnamara, Steven. "Martyrdom and masculinity : ideology and masculine identity in the work of Radclyffe Hall." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/55425/.
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This thesis explores the depiction of masculinity by one of literature's most famous female masculine writers, Radclyffe Hall. Chapters One and Two discuss two extremes in the reception of Hall's work: one a successful poem, 'The Blind Ploughman' (1913); and the other, The Master of the House (1932), a novel that was a commercial and critical failure for Hall. Both 'The Blind Ploughman' and The Master of the House depict spiritual, sensitive working class men who are different. While these texts are often mentioned in Hall scholarship, they have rarely been discussed individually. Chapter One addresses the impact of 'The Blind Ploughman' and its success as poem/song through association with the war wounded and how this, in turn, influenced Hall's depiction of damaged/different masculinity and its relationship to homosexuality. Chapter Two explores Hall's engagement with themes that were also being explored by modernist writers, in particular D. H. Lawrence's reimagining of the Christ story in his novella, 'The Escaped Cock' (1928); the chapter argues that The Master of the House uses Christianity to disguise the homoromantic subtext of the novel. In contrast, Chapter Three explores the more familiar topic of female masculinity in relation to Hall, but instead of focusing on male masculine identities, it presents evidence that Joan of Arc, one of history's most famous crossdressing women, was a female masculine role model for Hall. The influence of Joan of Arc is present both in Hall's understanding of her own female masculine identity and in the representation of her female characters. The aim of all three chapters in this thesis is to present a new way of viewing Hall and her work in order to demonstrate that she is more than just a writer of lesbian fiction.
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Ttoouli, George. "Twentieth century North American serial poetic form & ecological thinking." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/114480/.
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This thesis develops a reflexive methodology to read four North American long form poetic projects: Lorine Niedecker's North Central; Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest; and Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. The methodology, 'ecoseriality,' provides a way of reading serial structures in the 'web of life' (Jason W. More). Ecoseriality emerges through two research threads: ecological thinking (Lorraine Code, Dianne Chisholm), an interdisciplinary approach to ecological methodologies, and seriality, an extension of serial poetic form into an interdisciplinary understanding of serial qualities. The project's ecological thinking comprises a recombinant methodology primarily adapted from Moore's theories and methods for reading capitalism in the web of life, a number of philosophical approaches and concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping. The project's seriality begins with Joseph M. Conte's typology of serial poetic form, Unending Design: the Forms of Postmodern Poetry, reading serial structures across genres and disciplines to refresh understanding of serial poetry and poetics. Ecoseriality develops along three primary, overlapping lines of inquiry: Moore's oikeios, adapted to read competing subjectivities and values brought to bear on relations in the web of life; Jameson's cognitive mapping, adapted into a post-Cartesian strategy for reading the imbrication between matter and meaning; and an examination of how the parts of a series relate to the whole. The project applies these foci to the four case studies, exposing fresh perspectives on the poetry and poetics of each. By reading Howe's 'cannibal cosmology' (Miriam Nichols) through Moore's theories of world-economy and world-ecology, the thesis arrives at an understanding of ecoseriality as an ethical ecological practice within the complex series of relations in the web of life. Ecoseriality thereby emerges as an oikeios for valuing complex relations in the web of life. The analysis concludes with discussion of the cosmological values of the serial poetic projects examined in relation to ecological thinking.
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Harris, Nicola Joy. "'The means of seeing' : looking at reality in the novels of Thomas Hardy." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1998. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8018/.
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Hardy approached the problem of nineteenth-century realism as an ontological and literary concern largely through images of perception. This thesis suggests that Hardy adopted an innovative approach in an effort to identify the term, and argues that his subversive contribution to the Great Debate occasioned the necessary impetus for the experimental fictions of the twentieth century. In rejecting the orthodox, aesthetic prescriptions established by such authorities as George Eliot and Henry James, it is suggested that Hardy released the Victorian novel from its restricting reliance on ostensibly objective fact and paved the way for a more subjective interpretation of reality and a more introspective kind of narrative. It is contended that Hardy's literary response to a range of optical treatises encouraged his challenging reinterpretation of reality. As a preparatory measure, 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' metaphorically petrifies the perspective; 'Far from the Madding Crowd' interrogates Ruskin's theory of moral perception; 'The Return of the Native' looks at phenomena through an intellectual lens; 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' judges a reality filtered through a sartorially-inclined public eye instructed by Carlyle; 'The Woodlanders', the turning point in the sequence, observes with an eye disillusioned by the evolutionists; 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' creates a reality from the affective eye championed by Comte and Fourier; 'Jude the Obscure' wanders blindly between two literary eras, perceptual incoherences, and dislocations between phenomenal and noumenal compromising the narrative's formal integrity. This thesis maintains that, through an idiosyncratic frame of referentiality as well as regard, Hardy transforms the objective, material world into his own versions of reality, and triumphs over oppressive facts by subjectively appropriating them. Each of Hardy's works offers an alternative yet equally viable perceptual angle from which the creation, form, and function of reality as a psychological, practical, ontological, and literary concern can be judged.
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Ward, Mary Elizabeth. "Forests of thought and fields of perception : landscape and community in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8674/.
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Old English poetry is centred on the concept of community and the importance of belonging. Landscape was a component of any community since, during the period when Old English poetry was being composed and written down, the landscape was a far more important constituent of daily life than it is for the majority of people today. Landscape dictated the places that could be settled, as well as the placing of the paths, fords, and bridges that joined them; it controlled boundaries, occupations, and trading routes. In the poetry of the period landscape, as part of the fabric of community, is the arbiter of whether each element of a community is in its proper place and relationship to the others. It is the means of explaining how a community is constructed, policed, and empowered. Erring communities can be corrected or threats averted through the medium of landscape which also positions communities in place and time. Landscape is presented as the cause of dissension in heaven, the consequent creation of hell, and the key to comprehension of the fundamental difference between them. The linguistic landscapes of Old English poetry are a functional component of the meaning inherent in the narratives.
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Monks, Philip. "The importance of the poetry book in the digital age." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8128/.
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An examination through the creation and curation of a printed poetry collection, together with other practice-based and wider research, of how far digital technology has influenced contemporary poetry and the status of the poetry book. Personal practice is considered and analysed and, from this, and research leading out from this, a more general survey provided of the impact of digital technology on the poet’s persona, the creation of the poems themselves and on their dissemination. These wider issues, and the practice-based research that underlies them, inform the specific consideration of the extent to which digital technology has affected the nature and importance of the single collection poetry book in the early part of the twenty-first century. The conclusion is drawn that, for the poet, and for contemporary poetry more generally, the importance of the printed poetry book is greater than ever and that digital technology has further increased its impact, vitality and relevance.
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Cho, Dukhee. "Political Shakespeare in Korea : from the early twentieth century to today." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2028. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8574/.
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This thesis examines Korea's reception of Shakespeare from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, paying specific attention to the significant extent to which this reception has been influenced by the nation's political circumstances. The thesis focuses on Korea's political upheavals, including Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, the division of the country, dictatorship and rapid modernisation and Westernisation, which affected attitudes towards accepting, understanding and adapting Shakespeare and his works. My introduction explores how Korea has made Shakespeare its own, along with a theory of adaptation and appropriation. Chapter 1 considers Korea's first encounter with Shakespeare in the early twentieth century via his biography, excerpted quotations in magazines and newspapers and translated Victorian-era presentations of his works, all of which focused on moral didacticism. Chapter 2 analyses two Shakespeare-inspired novels written under the political hardships of Japanese colonial rule and dictatorial governance. Chapter 3 addresses political renditions of Hamlet on the stage under the dictatorial regime. Chapter 4 investigates North Korea's socialist reception of Shakespeare since the division of the country to today. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 discuss culturally-invested adaptations of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century that put Shakespeare's characters and stories in Korean locales. This thesis concludes by arguing that even though Shakespearean adaptations today focus mostly on creating culturally localised versions so that they can become less political, Korea's reception of Shakespeare over the past century has been informed by many political motifs arising from artists' concerns about the fate of their country.
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Bailach, Teresa. "West Indian theatre : Derek Walcott and the infinite rehearsal." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2005. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/103796/.
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This thesis analyses three of Derek Walcott's plays in the light of Wilson Harris's ideas of 'infinite rehearsal' and 'unfinished genesis.' The purpose of this thesis is to explore Walcott's definition of the artist and his relation to society in the context of decolonisation. Throughout the thesis the struggle against nihilism appears as a constant underlying goal that both writers relate to the essence of the Caribbean, as a symbol of survival and regenesis. The first part of the thesis offers a deep analysis of Harrisian concepts of literature and its connection to reality, and an exploration of the links between Harris's ideas and the theatrical genre in the context of Walcott's early theatrical endeavours. The second part of the thesis presents a reading of Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Dream on Monkey Mountain, and Pantomime, that highlights the development of Walcott's notions of the artist in relation to his society and to the world. The unresolved conflicts of the pre-1970 period give way to a coherent and grounded set of principles that offer an example of one Caribbean artist's attempt at restoring the pieces of his fragmented identity. Reading Derek Walcott's plays in a Harrisian context throws new light into his theatrical production, and brings to the surface elements that had remained hidden and overlooked. The use of Wilson Harris as a theoretical background responds to two main aspects of these writers' work. On the one hand, the scope of Wilson Harris's philosophical world draws links with manifold cultures and literary traditions. More importantly, Wilson Harris proposes a fluid environment in which Walcott's divided self can find a suitable malleable ground.
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Campbell, Alexandra. "Archipelagic poetics : ecology in modern Scottish and Irish poetry." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/9102/.
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This thesis examines a range of poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Modernist period to the present day, who take the relationship between humans, poetry and the natural world as a primary point of concern. Through precise, materially attentive engagements with the coastal, littoral, and oceanic dimensions of place, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Jen Hadfield, respectively turn towards the vibrant space of the Atlantic archipelago in order to contemplate new modes of relation that are able to contend with the ecological and political questions engendered by environmental crises. Across their works, the archipelago emerges as a physical and critical site of poetic relation through which poets consider new pluralised, devolved, and ‘entangled’ relationships with place. Derived from the geographic term for ‘[a]ny sea, or sheet of water, in which there are numerous islands’, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ has recently gained critical attention within Scottish and Irish studies due to its ability to re-orientate the critical axis away from purely Anglocentric discourses. Encompassing a range of spatial frames from bioregion to biosphere, islands to oceans, and temporal scales from deep pasts to deep futures, the poets considered here turn to the archipelago as a means of reckoning with the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene poses about the relationships between humans and the environment. Crucially, through a series of comparative readings, the project presents fresh advancements in ecocritical scholarship, with regards to the rise of material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the ‘Blue Humanities’.
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Melville, Nicholas James. "The Imperative Commands : the poetics of imperatives and assertions in everyday life." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30624/.
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The Imperative Commands is an interdisciplinary creative writing PhD in two parts: (a) a poem-object of 365 pages, which is an original engagement with found everyday instructional language, reimagined in an experimental/visual format; (b) ‘Appropriate Language,’ a critical and theoretical afterword exploring the inspiration, themes and methods of the poem. The premise of The Imperative Commands is to investigate current institutional and corporate language and appropriate it as poetry. It is a collagistic arrangement of found imperatives and assertions, harvested from the language of state institutions and corporate bodies that hail people on a daily basis. To create this long poetic work I set myself the initial constraint of harvesting found language during the course of a calendar year (May 1st 2014 to 30th April 2015). During this time I collected found imperatives, assertions, naturalizations of contestable information as fact, and other forms of overt and tacit instruction. The material was then transcribed, organized and rearranged in a variety of forms, using both chance and editorial interventions to make deviant collocations, stochastic juxtapositions, concrete-visual constellations and lyrical expression. ‘Appropriate Language’ breaks into several forms of afterword. The introduction outlines the general architecture and aims behind The Imperative Commands, as well as key influences on my practice and what inspired the thesis. Its main purpose is to explore ideas around how society is manipulated by language and ideology by, and for, the various institutions that seek to influence us. To do this it focuses on the writing of two thinkers: (1) the so-called ‘father of public relations’ Edward Bernays (1891-1995), who was instrumental in developing PR in the 20th century; and (2) French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and his theory of Ideological State Apparatuses—which form and inform the essential structure of society outside the state—and interpellation, whereby individuals become ‘subjects’ through the ways in which they are hailed by ISAs and ideology. The second purpose of ‘Appropriate Language’ is to consider the affinities and differences that The Imperative Commands has with Conceptual Writing, with a particular focus on the work and ideas of poet Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961). My research into Conceptual Writing, and its claims of unreadability, helped to remind me of the importance of readability that I feel about my own work. That the organization of the found texts should be a readable, though idiosyncratic, book is crucial to The Imperative Commands. The harvested material when reorganized to make the poem reveals aspects of the life of a subject during a specific period of time, with disparate facets of social control brought into focus through the various language forms that constitute everyday life. The poem-object, that is also a social document, explores ways of uniting the notion of ‘concept’ and experimental writing—particularly within some of the methodologies of Conceptual Writing—with ways of maintaining and supporting a ‘self’ that is both lyrical and political.
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Foulds, Alexandra Laura. "Gothic monster fiction and the 'novel-reading disease', 1860-1900." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30684/.
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This thesis scrutinises the complex ‘afterlife’ of sensation fiction in the wake of the 1860s and ‘70s, after the end of the period that critics have tended to view as the heyday of literary sensationalism. It identifies and explores the consistent framing of sensation fiction as a pathological ‘style of writing’ by middle-class critics in the periodical press, revealing how such responses were moulded by new and emerging medical research into the nervous system, the cellular structure of the body, and the role played by germs in the transmission of diseases. Envisioned as a disease characterised by its new immersive and affective reading process, sensation fiction was believed to be infecting its readers. It infiltrated their nervous systems, instigating a process of metamorphosis that gradually depleted their physical and mental integrity and reduced them to a weakened, ‘flabby’, ‘limp’ state. The physical boundaries of the body, however, were not the only limits that sensation fiction seemed to wilfully disregard. ‘[S]preading in all directions’, it contaminated other modes, other media, and other kinds of recreational entertainment, making them equally sensational and pathological. One of these modes was Gothic monster fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, which was repeatedly labelled ‘sensational’ and described as generating the same cardiovascular responses as works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry Wood. This infection of fin de siècle Gothic fiction by literary sensationalism can be gauged in the plots and monsters that those texts portray. Gothic monster narratives at the end of the nineteenth century are shaped by the concerns at the heart of middle-class commentators’ responses to sensation fiction, and by the medical lexicon employed to vocalise these anxieties. Monstrosity is linked to contagion and stimulation, as the monster seems to pollute all those with whom it comes into contact. It triggers a process of degeneration and debilitation akin to that associated with the reading of sensation fiction, producing a host of ‘shocked’, nervous, or hysterical characters. Encounters with the monster are linked to recreational reading or other kinds of behaviour that such reading became associated with, such as thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and illicit sexual desire. The result is a group of texts in which the monster embodies the same threat to boundaries, as well as individual, and, at times, national health that middle-class reviewers associated with literary sensationalism.
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Wilkins, Katrina M. "Characterization in Ælfric's Esther : a cognitive stylistic examination." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/52051/.
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This thesis examines characterization in Ælfric’s Old English version of the biblical book of Esther, from the perspective of cognitive stylistics. This area of study uses concepts and methods from linguistics in order to better understand both how literature works and how language works. The study investigates explicit characterization cues, discourse presentation, semantic fields, and deixis to illuminate how Ælfric’s careful linguistic choices construct characters that remain true to their biblical exempla, make sense to his Anglo-Saxon audience, and underscore the doctrinal themes of the narrative. Chapter 1 describes the textual history of Esther, from its origins to its reception in the early Middle Ages. This is followed by a discussion of the history of Ælfric’s version of the story and its treatment by scholars in the modern era. Chapter 2 outlines my methodology, based in cognitive stylistics, which draws on concepts from cognitive science and related fields to understand what happens in the reader’s mind during reading. In addition, I occasionally draw on corpus stylistics methods, and this is also described. The results and discussion of this analysis form the bulk of Chapters 3 through 6. Chapter 3 focuses on explicit cues, those things that directly describe a character’s personality traits. Speech, thought, and writing presentation are the focus of Chapter 4, which examines how these modes of discourse are presented and how this presentation contributes to the characterization. In Chapter 5 I examine two semantic fields of particular importance in this text: emotions and food. Finally, Chapter 6 addresses two aspects of deixis: relational deixis and Deictic Shift Theory. Although, in all chapters, the analysis primarily focuses on the five main characters (Ahasuerus, Esther, Vashti, Mordecai, and Haman), other apposite characters are also discussed, including the Jews, the Persians, God, and even Ælfric. This kind of cognitive stylistic analysis of Old English and other historical literature is doubly useful. First, it offers new and valuable insights into this literature. The present study, for example, notes minute linguistic details that offer significant characterization cues and also explains the peculiar sense of many Anglo-Saxonists (and other historians) that they know very well people whom they have never met. Second, such examination demonstrates that the chosen methods are robust enough to cope with literature much older than that normally engaged in modern stylistic studies. This not only verifies the utility of the methods, but also attests to the universal nature of their underlying principles.
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Greig, Pamela L. C. "The "Lay Folks' Catechism" : an edition." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/53204/.
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This thesis presents the first critical edition of the Lay Folks’ Catechism using the previously unpublished Oxford, Bodleian MS Don.c.13 as the base text. The list of extant witnesses is revised and includes the newly discovered Chetham Library fragment. The edition presents detailed manuscript descriptions, variants from all 26 witnesses, notes on the text and a comprehensive glossary. The introduction considers the roles of Archbishop Thoresby and the Benedictine John de Gaitrik in commissioning and composing the Catechism, and its sources and orthodoxy are confirmed. Scribal presentation of the text as verse or prose is re-examined in conjunction with Gaitrik’s use of punctuation and various literary devices, and a new conclusion reached concerning the text’s construction. The Catechism’s distribution and circulation, its effectiveness as a didactic text, and the transition from northern clergy to non-secular ownership are discussed. The edition establishes the importance of the Catechism in late medieval vernacular pastoralia aimed at a pious lay audience.
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Jones, Philip. "Rewriting the Atlantic archipelago : modern British poetry at the coast." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/51877/.
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Despite a so-called ‘oceanic turn’, there has been relatively little attention paid to literary representations of the shoreline as a specific material and cultural site. This thesis examines how modern British poets respond to and represent the coastline in their work, with particular emphasis on notions of place and geographic scale. Whilst looking at the use of the archipelago in recent cultural and literary studies of British and Irish writing, this thesis argues for a more refined and complex sense of the archipelagic, one which responds to the needs and demands of an increasingly global and interconnected world. To better understand this relationship between text and coastal landscape, the project draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, as well as Edward Casey’s investigations into the future of place and Philip E. Steinberg’s reconceptualisation of ocean spaces. In engaging with ideas of place in a newly intense period of globalisation, this thesis contends that a critical desire to focus on disruptions of linear spatial and temporal scales must still negotiate residual notions of bounded communities and national identities. The archipelago emerges both as a site of rupture and interconnection. In attending to these different levels of geographic experience, the thesis also demonstrates how notions of scale must respond to more than spatial distance, becoming attentive to how a variety of emotional and psychological experiences become frayed and disrupted within the shifts between the local, national and planetary. In the poetry of Peter Riley, Wendy Mulford, Robert Hampson, Matt Simpson and Robert Minhinnick, the shore emerges as an ambivalent and fluid terrain but one, nonetheless, in possession of its own social and cultural histories.
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May, Charlotte. "An edition of the selected letters of Samuel Rogers." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/45856/.
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This thesis offers an edition of the selected letters of the poet Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). Rogers was a member of extensive social networks in the late eighteenth and early to mid- nineteenth centuries. The Introduction looks at how the study of correspondence reveals the author to be an individual actively engaged in sociability. The content of a letter, its intended recipient, and the format of the letter itself, reveals the intricacies of the cultivation of sociability. The letter fulfils four crucial functions: to inform the recipient, thank them, ask a request of them, and create future opportunities for sociability, demonstrating the multi-faceted role of correspondence. Chapter One, ‘Rogers’s Reputation’, examines the history of Rogers’s critical reputation, which is particularly pertinent in this project which seeks to reinstate Rogers in current conversations on eighteenth and nineteenth century poets. Chapter Two, ‘Rogers and his Correspondents’, follows on from this by demonstrating how Rogers’s correspondence sheds light on professional, political and literary identities for both men and women in society. These chapters which recover Rogers’s reputation and highlight his role in the professional development of his acquaintances, are followed by the edition of the selected letters of Samuel Rogers, including the editorial methodology for the transcriptions, the footnoted letters themselves, and concludes with summative biographies of the correspondents included in this edition. A list of all of the letters written by Rogers which have come to light during this project, are included as the appendix.
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Marlatt, Cameo Rae-Ann. "Letters for a Newfoundland Dog and other encounters with nonhuman animals ; Bird's Work." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30584/.
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This project encompasses a collection of lyric essays and a collection of poetry engaging with the topic of zoopoetics, which as a field is interested in the way that attentiveness to the poiesis of nonhuman animals can shape human creative forms. The lyric essays, which form my critical component, are each centered on what Donna Haraway would refer to as a ‘companion species,’ a term that extends beyond companion animals such as pets to include any animals we share our lives with. Looking at frogs, dogs, whales, cats, bats, and parrots, I explore my personal history with specific animals of these species, and also analyze their representation in literature, art, and popular culture. Within a zoopoetic framework, the essays engage with scholarship around anthropomorphism, animals and gender, animal captivity, and animal history. The poetry collection, which forms my creative component, explores various ways of writing nonhuman animals. Writing with curiosity and attentiveness towards non-human animals, I aim for my poems to embody the shared animal-human poiesis at the heart of zoopoetics.
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Xu, Xiaofan. "A poet's country : landscape and nationhood in T.S. Eliot's post-conversion poetry and politics." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/49120/.
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The thesis contributes to the knowledge on modernist national identity in the transnational context, with a primary focus on the agency of the rural landscape in the identity-making process. It engages with the post-conversion works of T. S. Eliot, investigates his ruralism in relation to the metropolitan and cosmopolitan aspects of modernism, and situates it within the context of late modernism where an idealised representation of rurality is exploited by various ideologies including fascism and imperialism. By drawing upon insights from transnational modernism and latest theoretical advances on cosmopolitanism, the thesis reveals through the case of Eliot that representations of rurality, local allegiances and rootedness can be emancipatory and coextensive with cosmopolitan projects. My investigation begins by examining the ruralist elements in Eliot’s poetry, pageant and translations during the decade of his conversion to the Anglican Church in 1927, and demonstrates how an emphasis on roots, inheritance and rural living is at once occasioned by and constitutes part of the cosmopolitan condition. The discussion of rootedness is then carried forward to its moral implications, namely its accused complicity with the fascist discourse of the 1930s. A reading of Eliot’s interwar play alongside texts from British surrealism reveals that the vocabulary of ‘Blood and Soil’ used as a fascist slogan can also feed into an alternative literary imagination, one that is devolutionary and anti-nationalist. The argument proceeds to Eliot’s wartime works and reveals how a transnational identity—again channelled through representations of rurality—intervenes into and resists the imperialist spatial ordering of the centre and the periphery. All these discussions of the transnational facets of Eliot’s modernist ruralism prompt a reconsideration of the widely-made association between land-writing and reactionary politics, which the thesis challenges by showing that seeds of modernity and resistance are nonetheless meted out by representations of rurality and local roots.
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Shirley, Victoria. "The Galfridian tradition(s) in England, Scotland, and Wales : texts, purpose, context, 1138-1530." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2017. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/110303/.
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This thesis examines the responses to and rewritings of the Historia regum Britanniae in England, Scotland, and Wales between 1138 and 1530, and argues that the continued production of the text was directly related to the erasure of its author, Geoffrey of Monmouth. In contrast to earlier studies, which focus on single national or linguistic traditions, this thesis analyses different translations and adaptations of the Historia in a comparative methodology that demonstrates the connections, contrasts and continuities between the various national traditions. Chapter One assesses Geoffrey’s reputation and the critical reception of the Historia between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, arguing that the text came to be regarded as an authoritative account of British history at the same time as its author’s credibility was challenged. Chapter Two analyses how Geoffrey’s genealogical model of British history came to be rewritten as it was resituated within different narratives of English, Scottish, and Welsh history. Chapter Three demonstrates how the Historia’s description of the island Britain was adapted by later writers to construct geographical landscapes that emphasised the disunity of the island and subverted Geoffrey’s vision of insular unity. Chapter Four identifies how the letters between Britain and Rome in the Historia use argumentative rhetoric, myths of descent, and the discourse of freedom to establish the importance of political, national, or geographical independence. Chapter Five analyses how the relationships between the Arthur and his immediate kin group were used to challenge Geoffrey’s narrative of British history and emphasise problems of legitimacy, inheritance, and succession. Chapter Six examines how the linguistic change of place names, and the reconfiguration of the insular landscape, undermine claims of British sovereignty and legitimise the transition of power between the Britons and the Saxons. Finally, the conclusion addresses how translators, adaptors, and compilers used the strategies of evaluation, quotation, translation, imitation, and revision to determine the authority of Geoffrey’s narrative of British history.
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Tyrrell, Thomas. "Remapping Milton : space, place and influence, 1700-1800." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2017. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/111233/.
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In my examination of the influence of John Milton’s poetry on eighteenth century literature, I argue that eighteenth-century writers engage with ideas of space and place as they seek to transform Miltonic verse into a suitable medium for describing the Newtonian astronomy and imperial geography of their day. My first chapter examines John Philips’s Cyder and John Dyer’s The Fleece alongside county maps and commercial atlases, as part of a study of how their verse appropriates Milton’s politics and revises his geography. In my second chapter, I use digital mapping technology to explore the different viewing perspectives James Thomson uses in The Seasons, how they derive from Milton, and how they support his project to describe a harmonious, providential global geography. My third chapter investigates adaptations of Milton’s A Mask Performed at Ludlow Castle (1634). Across the eighteenth century, A Mask generated an opera, a play and a novel, and I examine how the meaning of each adaptation changes due to the altered place and context of performance. In my last two chapters, I argue that the female tradition of astronomical poetry seeks to reconcile Miltonic verse with Newtonian science whilst also critiquing it from a devotional perspective. Finally, I claim that Ann Yearsley and Charlotte Smith used Milton’s influence as a means to usurp the exclusively male territory of the eighteenth-century prospect poem, through poetry written from Clifton Hill in Bristol and Beachy Head on the South Downs. In my coda on William Wordsworth I conclude that to view him as the culmination of eighteenth-century engagement with Milton is to bias our understanding of both authors. Reconsidering Milton’s eighteenth-century influence is a vital part not only of understanding the worldview of the age, but also of distinguishing Milton himself from what the eighteenth century made of him.
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Garcia, Rangel Sherezade. "The Wounded Me : a novel and critical essay on Hugo Simberg's oeuvre and the literary engagement with his painting The Wounded Angel." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7355/.
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Mastropierro, Lorenzo. "Corpus stylistics and translation studies : a corpus-assisted study of Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and its Italian translations." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2016. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/33678/.
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This thesis carries out a corpus stylistic study of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. It investigates the role of textual patterns as building blocks of the fictional world and triggers of literary themes. It also investigates the effects of translation on the relation between textual patterns and the fictional world, and discusses the potential consequences of translational alterations on the text’s themes. Heart of Darkness is a complex and multifaceted text that deals with a multitude of themes and has been interpreted in many different ways. By offering an overview of the text’s literary reception, I foreground two major themes that emerge from the contemporary critical debate as particularly central to the discussion about Conrad and his text: “Africa and its representation” and “race and racism”. Through a keyword analysis, I establish a connection between these themes and the lexical level of the text. Adopting Mahlberg & McIntyre’s (2011) model, I group keywords into categories that reflect specific aspects of the fictional world and the thematic concerns of the text. I then select groups of keywords that relate specifically to “Africa and its representation” and “race and racism” for more in-depth examination. Specifically, I analyse how the African jungle and the African natives are linguistically represented in the text. I demonstrate that repeated lexico-semantic patterns shape these fictional representations and play a fundamental part in the interpretation of the two themes related to them. I then focus on the Italian versions and compare them in order to show the effects of translation on the lexico-semantic patterns. I show that alterations made at the linguistic level affect the interpretational level of the translations, with potential consequences for the reception of the major themes in the target context. Finally, I use computational methods to compare the original and the translations at the level of whole texts, as opposed to feature-specific comparisons. I claim that together these two perspectives provide a more nuanced understanding of the relation between source and target texts. Through this analysis, the present thesis explores how the fictional world and literary themes are constructed and conveyed in literature and in its translation. It also contributes to the critical discussion on Heart of Darkness and proposes a methodology to analyse and compare literary translations. Finally, as an interdisciplinary project, this thesis builds on the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies, and strengthens this relation further.
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Sun, Shuo. "The reception of Jane Austen in China." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2016. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/38499/.
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In China, Jane Austen is today widely acknowledged as one of the greatest English writers. Yet her literary reputation has altered greatly since her works were first introduced to Chinese readers in the early decades of the twentieth century. This thesis will examine and explain the major changes in the Chinese reception of Austen in light of the political, social, and cultural upheavals experienced by the country over the last century. The introduction will provide a historical overview of Chinese translation and criticism of Austen’s novels. During the first half of the twentieth century, Austen was generally disapproved of by Chinese critics for restricting her writing to a limited social sphere and her fame therefore grew slowly. I will discuss the influence of Chinese political history on critical assessments regarding Austen’s conservatism and realism. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Marxism came to dominate the literary and cultural scenes. As a consequence, some Chinese translators attempted to incorporate Austen’s works into a Marxist canon, but failed. I will investigate the profound impact of the Communist Party’s political campaigns on the translation and reception of Western literature in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. However, since the 1980s Austen has enjoyed a rapid rise in critical reputation and popularity in China, with her six major novels all appearing in Chinese. However, there are presently significant differences in the reception of each of these novels. The six main chapters of this thesis will examine the reasons behind the popularity of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma and the relative obscurity of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. In doing so, I will explore Chinese critics’ views of Austen’s connection to feminism, conservatism, and romanticism as well as areas of literary debate in her time. I will demonstrate the radical changes in Chinese approaches to Austen’s works in recent decades. This thesis also aims to compare the reception of Austen in China to that in Britain, and contains questionnaire and interview surveys that were conducted among undergraduate students at the University of Nottingham’s China and UK campuses.
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Barker, Anna. "Green fiction : ecocriticism of the contemporary novel." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2016. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/32673/.
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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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Armstrong, Catherine. "Representations of North American 'place' and 'potential' in English travel literature, 1607-1660." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2004. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2628/.
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This thesis analyses the representations of North America in English travel narratives between the years 1607-1660. Texts in both print and manuscript format are examined to discover how authors described the geography, climate, landscape, flora and fauna of America, as well as the settlements established there by the English. The thesis is mostly concerned with literature concerning Virginia and New England, although the settlements of Newfoundland, Maine and Maryland are also briefly mentioned. The first chapter describes the methodology of the thesis and locates its place alongside the existing literature. A chapter explaining the pre-history of English involvement in North America in the reign of Elizabeth I follows. Chapter Three describes the connection between printing and adventuring on which the thesis is predicted, explaining how the authors’ intentions and experiences affected their portrayal of the New World. The ways in which authors understood the geography and climate of America are explored in Chapter Four, including the influence of European thinking and the writers’ experiences in America itself. The landscape, including rivers, mountains and forests are examined next in chapter five, with a special focus on the Englishmen’s subduing of the landscape and their reactions to its potential. Chapters Six and Seven deal with the flora and fauna of the New World, tracing how the settlers’ initial high hopes of using the diversity of wildlife they encountered gave way to the realisation that familiar crops and animals imported from Europe would prove more useful than those found locally, with a few notable exceptions, such as tobacco. Chapters Eight and Nine analyse the changing representations of the English settlements themselves, by comparing the English experiences in Virginia and those of New England. Again, initial hopes give way to an acceptance of a less idealistic vision for the plantations. Chapter Ten brings the focus of the thesis back to England, asking how printed information about the New World was transmitted around the country by various practitioners of the printing trade, and who was able to digest this information. The representation of America, not only in travel narratives, but also in other forms of literature such as ballads, poetry and plays, are reviewed more broadly in chapter eleven, and an attempt is made to define the responses of individual and collective readers to the news from the New World that they gathered. In its conclusion, the thesis explores the influence of this literature on the new scientific thinking and on England’s relationship with her colonies.
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Muto, Hiroshi. "The 'disembodied voice' in fin-de-siècle British literature : its genealogy and significances." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3938/.
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A particular kind of voice recurs in fin-de-siècle British literature. It is a voice without a human body, a voice whose source is either invisible or non-human. This study explores the historical factors underlying the literary representation of such a voice. Chapter 1 examines Arthur Symons' phrase, 'the disembodied voice of a human soul,' and sets up the context for the subsequent discussion by teasing out the four major implications of the fin-de-siècle disembodied voice: the socio-political, the aesthetico-linguistic, the techno-scientific, and the sexual-somatic. Chapter 2 first outlines the modern origin of the disembodied voice in the Gothic-Romantic culture of the late eighteenth century, where the frequent description of the disembodied voice is linked to the rise of the nostalgia for premodernity; the chapter then analyzes the disembodied voice in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness both in terms of Gothic culture and of the fin-de-siècle situation. The Romantic aesthetico-linguistic prioritization of the aural-oral, which we call 'melocentricism,' the fin-de-siècle consumerism and colonialism, and the then influential scientific concept of ether receive scrutiny. Chapter 3 addresses Oscar Wilde's Salome. Apart from the factors that this play shares with Conrad's novella, the disembodied voice in Salome secretly expresses a longing for the homosexual-cum-communal. Chapter 4 explores the fin-de-siècle imperial and homosexual implications, and the 'melocentric' pre-history, of the phonographic voice in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Chapter 5 teases out the hidden political dimension of the technological voice, phonographic and wireless, in Kipling's Kim and '"Wireless".' Chapter 6 compares the fin-de-siècle voice with an instance of the early twentieth-century, the wireless voice in D. H. Lawrence's Ladv Chatterley's Lover, a voice now involved in the global network of broadcasting. It is concluded that the disembodied voice is inseparable from important aspects of fin-de-siècle British culture as well as the question of modernity.
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Salvey, Courtney. "Mechanism and meaning : British natural theology and the literature of technology, 1820-1840." Thesis, University of Kent, 2014. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/47605/.
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As Carlyle recognized—and Arnold deplored—the nineteenth century was the ‘Age of Machinery’. Increasingly ubiquitous physical things, machines were also increasingly important cultural objects. In this project, I track how the meanings of machines were constructed by an emergent ‘literature of technology’ and ask what cultural work those meanings accomplished. From popular expositions of steam engines to mechanics textbooks to industrial travel narratives to histories of technology, the material, literary, and generic forms of these texts constructed the ‘machine’ as an intelligible object of public culture, as part of nature, as passive servant to human agents, and as the product of complex development. The cultural impact of such significances reverberated beyond debates on technology to shape seemingly irrelevant discourses: these meanings were harnessed by mechanical metaphors to do work in other cultural domains from poetics to political economy to religion. As a case study, I trace how each of these meanings supported or challenged the plausibility of natural theology in the 1830s, a religious discourse built on an analogy between machines and natural objects. Drawing on often-read texts like Babbage’s 'On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures' and Ure’s 'Philosophy of Manufactures' and lesser-read texts like the Bridgewater Treatises, Lardner’s 'The Steam Engine', Head’s 'A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts', and Whewell’s 'Mechanics of Engineering', this project ultimately argues that the way technology is talked about matters.
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Routledge, Amy. "'Dress and undress thy soul' : nakedness and theology in early modern literature and culture." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2014. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/5536/.
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This thesis examines how concepts and images of nakedness are used to shape literary and theological meaning and experience within the literature and culture of early modern England. It considers how nakedness functions within a number of key literary and spiritual forms, including theological treatises, the spiritual allegory, religious lyrics, and drama. The first three chapters establish the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of nakedness, through an examination of the Bible, the works of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Anglican Church practice and debate, and anatomical texts and practices. The final three chapters offer a close analysis of the meaning and affect of nakedness within three distinct literary forms. This thesis contends that nakedness has a spiritual potency: a spiritual charge recognised and utilised by early modern theologians, preachers and writers, as they debated, defined and expressed their faith. It considers how far the meaning of nakedness is shaped by gender, and how early modern society negotiated the tensions between bodily sanctity and obscenity, naked praise and pornography. The thesis concludes by reflecting how far tropes and experiences of nakedness in our time remain obscurely charged, albeit in non-theological contexts, with something like theological meaning.