Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
Recent Submissions
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People, places and texts: re/presenting Islam in Edinburgh, Scotland
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-12-18)Of Britain’s 2.8 million Muslims, nearly two-thirds originate from South Asia, primarily Pakistan and Bangladesh, with the remainder from North Africa, East Europe and South East Asia. Much of the scholarship on Muslims ... -
Study of Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-01-07)This thesis is a study of the ways in which Hugh MacDiarmid’s long poem In Memoriam James Joyce incorporates material from various source texts. It argues that In Memoriam’s use of citation is a response to the changing ... -
Modernist theatre, theatricality and twentieth-century physics
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-01-08)For all of their many differences, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett have in common the fact that they have each exerted a significant influence upon the way in which theatre is both conceived of and ... -
Affective spaces: trajectories of migration in Scandinavian and German transnational narratives (2011-2017)
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-01-09)This thesis comparatively examines literary representations of lived migrant and postmigrant experiences in different contemporaneous contexts and from a multiplicity of perspectives. Published between 2011 and 2017 and ... -
Private stage: a study on Chinese printed drama by Bai Wei and Yuan Changying, 1922-1936
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-06-29)Play-reading is a modern phenomenon, as, traditionally, drama relied on oral transmission from master to students to be passed on. Following the rapid growth of drama publication in early Republican China, play-reading ... -
Reassessing Karen Blixen’s Gengældelsens Veje/ The Angelic Avengers: a novel challenging gender, totalitarianism and colonial practices
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)The aim of this thesis is to challenge Gengældelsens Veje/The Angelic Avengers’ (GV/AA) marginalisation in Karen Blixen’s work, by offering a comprehensive and multidimensional reassessment of this text. The thesis ... -
Liyuan Opera Lizhiji: new materials, stories and insights
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)Lizhiji, or Legends of Lychee, is the most important work of the Liyuan Opera, a vernacular local opera prevalent in southern Fujian and eastern Guangdong provinces which is representative of the region’s performing arts ... -
Tweed: a design and cultural history 1828–2014
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-27)Anderson, Fiona. Tweed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Tweed undertakes an in-depth analysis of the design and cultural history of these fabrics from their initial development in Scotland in the 1820s to 2014. This ... -
Edge(work) and beginnings: towards a trans- and gender non-conforming poetics
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)The poems in Edge(work) traverse and ponder the strangeness of memory; an often pluralized speaker invites the reader into an opaque world of grief, loss, slow-burning desires and maternal connection. I am a trans- writer ... -
Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s short fiction: gender and genre in the Late Nineteenth Century literary imagination
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This thesis situates the short fiction of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson in relation to the canon of late nineteenth century literature, tracing the ways that Stevenson’s texts draw from multiple generic traditions and ... -
Departure and return in Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion oder der eremit in Griechenenland
(The University of Edinburgh, 1995-11-25)Let's begin at the beginning: Es gieht zwei Ideale unseres Daseyns: einen Zustand der höchsten Einfalt. wo unsre Bedürfnisse mit sich selbst, und mit unseren Kräften, und mit allem, womit wir in Verbindung stehen, durch ... -
Meet the author: the cult of the individual in unconventional journalism
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This thesis considers the forms of journalism that occupy the ambiguous boundary between literature and journalism. Though the distinction between literature and journalism is an increasingly popular subject of literary ... -
Feeling at home and seeing the other side: Muslim responses to right-wing populism
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)Is it going to be an Islamised Europe or Europeanised Islam? This is a question, a final ultimatum, almost apocalyptic, posed by commentators on Right-wing populism (RWP) across both sides of the Atlantic. RWP has ... -
Louis MacNeice and his influence on contemporary Northern Irish poetry
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This thesis examines in close detail the influence of Louis MacNeice’s work – primarily his poetry but also his critical prose and radio plays – in the poetry of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran ... -
God who speaks with/out words: the philosophical problem of revelation in contemporary Muslim theology
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This thesis explores the philosophical problem of divine revelation in contemporary Muslim theology by focusing critically on the works of ‘Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) an Iranian philosopher, modern theologian, and ... -
Décadence, Dekadenz, Dekadens: an interdiscursive exploration of decadence in German and Scandinavian literature and culture at the fin de siècle
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)In this thesis I develop an innovative theoretical and methodological approach for exploring interconnections between language, literature and culture at the fin de siècle in Germany and Sweden, focussing on the concept ... -
Functions of autoreception: Karl Ove Knausgård as author-critic and rewriter
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)Karl Ove Knausgård made his entry into the literary field as a critic in the 1990s, and he has since 1998 made his mark as a novelist and essayist. The six-volume autobiographical work Min kamp (2009-2011) is in essence ... -
Rethinking the concept of obscenity: the erotic subject and self-annihilation in the works of Blake, Shelley and Keats
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This doctoral thesis aims to examine how certain sexual images and motifs commonly deemed “obscene” are represented as a unique aesthetic phenomenon in the works of English Romantic poets, William Blake, Percy Bysshe ... -
(Re)negotiating boundaries in German concentration camp poetry
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)German-language concentration camp poetry has been repeatedly undervalued and misrepresented. When not overlooked entirely, these texts have primarily been conceptualised as historical documents, testimony, or cultural ... -
Comic license and extreme figurations in contemporary American storytelling
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)In this project I examine the significance and sophistication of comedy in contemporary American storytelling, in order to get beyond its frequent characterisation as either a superficial sweetener or a form of escapism. ...
