Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
Recent Submissions
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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. ... -
Zhang Tianyi’s selective acceptance of Charles Dickens
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)This research is a comparative study on the works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Zhang Tianyi 張天翼 (1906-1985). The former was one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian era; the latter, a Left-wing writer in ... -
Emergence of sociology in translation studies
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)Disciplinary awareness and understanding of various patterns and factors of emergence for ideas, consolidation and the diffusion of ideas and knowledge are as crucial in modern academic fields as in the wider context of ... -
Hereditary curse: inheritance and legacy in early modern revenge tragedy 1550-1610
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)My thesis examines how changing perceptions of the past, and escalating anxieties about the future, brought about by a disputed succession and the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, impacted on the development ... -
Heart of a peach and 'Are we such savages?' Mary Beckett's fiction and the failure of social mobility
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)Heart of a Peach and '"Are We Such Savages?" Mary Beckett's Fiction and the Failure of Social Mobility' is a PhD thesis comprising two components: a novel and a critical essay. My novel, Heart of a Peach, is structured ... -
Life and death boundaries: transgression in contemporary Japanese media
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)The theme of Life and Death Boundary Transgression has appeared recurrently in Japanese discourses since the writing of the Kojiki (711-712). The theme, which deals with journeys to the land of the dead, resurrections ... -
Interpreter of desires: Iranian cinema and psychoanalysis
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)The goal of this thesis is the study of the structure of desire and sexuality in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory. The scholarly literature on Iranian cinema has ... -
"This journey through the house": re-centring the domestic space in the storytelling of J.M. Barrie
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)This thesis discusses the representation of domesticity in the fiction of J.M. Barrie. It concentrates on the ways in which the home space in novels and plays produced by Barrie between 1896 and 1920, is designed to ... -
Narrativization of the global financial crisis by the Japanese press
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-09)The Global Financial Crisis of 2007 – 2008, culminating in the Lehman Shock on 15th September 2008, has been described as both a “once in a century event” and a “seismic shift” in global economics. Yet despite the exogenous ...
