Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
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Representations of home and belonging in fiction of the Scottish north
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)This thesis attempts a shift in the valuing of narrative sources, moving ethnographic writing and research toward a more subjective, emotive, imaginative sphere. While Scottish ethnology and folklore studies are no strangers ... -
Snow: chronotope and 'The Universe' in the novel
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-22)"Snow" opens with Anja MacLeod, a Southern Baptist from Guilford County – and her fiancé, Isaac Mashke – a Southern Jew – uprooting from the wintery Carolinas and heading for Edinburgh, Scotland. When family tragedy prevents ... -
Poetry as testimonio: writing human rights in Alicia Partnoy
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-16)This thesis studies the poetry of Alicia Partnoy (Argentina, b. 1955) as a form of testimonio. Partnoy is a survivor of disappearance, imprisonment and torture during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina. She was forced ... -
Desegmentalization: towards a common framework for the modeling of tonogenesis and registrogenesis in mainland Southeast Asia with case studies from Austroasiatic
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-15)Suprasegmental contrasts of tone and register are commonplace phonological phenomena among the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia and its periphery (MSEA) (Matisoff 1990, 2001). Insofar as we have come to understand the ... -
Nackian narratives: storytelling and ideology within Scotland's traveller communities
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-14)This thesis examines the storytelling traditions of one of Scotland’s most iconic yet underrepresented ethnic minorities, known to officialdom and the wider population as ‘Travellers’. The originality of the thesis ... -
Constructing aesthetics: reassessing Vygotsky’s early works in the context of the Russian modernist theatre
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-09)Lev Vygotsky has produced a significant yet largely understudied body of work in aesthetics, which focuses primarily on theatre and literature. This work was presented in several pieces of writing composed mainly in the ... -
Examining romanticism: English studies and the emergence of close reading, 1904-1930
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-09)This dissertation focuses on the relationship between literary studies and Romanticism during the years following the foundation of the Merton Chair of English Literature at Oxford, in 1904 up to 1930, with the rise of ... -
Retelling Karbala: a literary analysis of key plays of the Iranian Taʿziyeh repertoire
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-05-23)The Iranian taʿziyeh tradition commemorates the martyrdoms of Ḥusain b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭāleb and his supporters at Karbala in 61 AH /680 CE. It includes a largely anonymous cycle of plays, the main episodes portraying the ... -
Doctrine of Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān: Al-Ūdwī’s theory and contribution as found in the first chapter of his Nūr al-Īqān bi Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This dissertation is a study of the theory of Maulānā Muḥammad Ismāʿīil b. Maulānā Nabī Bakhsh al-Ūdwī, a respected South Asian Sindhī scholar (d. 1391/1970) with regard to the doctrine of iʿjāz al Qurʾān as found in the ... -
Human body in Chinese American diasporic novels set during China’s war with Japan, 1937-1945
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)[No Deposit Agreement] -
Voicing trauma: ungraspable idea and comprehensible presentation In Arnold Schoenberg's String Trio, Op. 45 and A survivor from Warsaw
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-04-04)Discussions surrounding musical meaning and traumatic memory both focus on the ineffability of their subjects, the fact that words and concrete narrative structures will never capture the inner reality of musical ... -
Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920s–1940s
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-23)This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal ... -
Unsettled minds: reframing health and wellbeing in contemporary indigenous literatures
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-21)This thesis explores representations of health and wellbeing in Indigenous literature published between 1990 and 2019. With an awareness of how discourses of “healing” have been instrumentalised by settler colonial ... -
Marvellous real in the Middle East: a comparative study of magical realism in contemporary women’s fiction
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-17)Magical realism has been studied extensively in relation to Latin America and subsequently in other parts of the world, yet the Middle East has not received adequate attention in academic scholarship. This PhD study examines ... -
Understanding intra-governmental collaboration and governmental reorganisations in China’s local food safety regulation from 2013 to 2019
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-16)Intra-governmental collaboration is considered in the current literature to be one of the principle reasons for China’s food safety problems. There are two gaps in the existing studies of intra-governmental collaboration ... -
Famine, fever, flood, and conquest: the impact of natural disasters on the ninth-century rise of the Vikings in the Carolingian Empire according to the Royal Frankish Annals, the Annals of Xanten, the Annals of St Bertin, and The Annals of Fulda
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-03)Events characterised as “natural disasters” now had an impact on early medieval Europe (c. AD 476-1054), but previous attempts to measure said impact have been hindered by ambiguous terminology. This study reviews the ... -
Class act or class dismissed?: The 1930s and working-class culture & identity
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-01)This thesis responds to the question of what it means in practice to bring the terms class, culture, and identity together; and is, in effect, a rejoinder that asks: ‘Should we bring them together?’ In short, the answer ... -
Queer spies in British Cold War culture: literature, film, theatre and television
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-02-23)This PhD thesis investigates how male homosexuality has been represented in British spy fiction from the 1950s to the 2010s in multiple media: literature, film, television and theatre. Due mainly to the betrayal of the ... -
Now es that tyme for ever gone”: exploring memory in select Middle English Arthurian romances c. 1300- c.1500
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-11-30)This thesis explores the ways in which memory was understood, explored, and deployed in the Middle English Arthurian romance corpus. Drawing on a broad range of texts, from the so-called “popular” romances on the one ... -
Our weekday preachers': humor in Victorian literature (1828-1868)
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This thesis investigates the use of humor in realist Victorian novels published between 1828– 1868. The main hypothesis of this project is that the novelists of this time period rely on humor as a powerful tool not just ...
