Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
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“Prized by the tourist”: souvenir books in Victorian Scotland
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)Scotland has been a popular tourist destination for over two centuries, with an intensely romantic reputation that persists to this day. This thesis argues that in the mid-Victorian era, this reputation was developed and ... -
From little acorns: trees and wood in Middle English romance
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-01-29)Trees occupy a paradoxical place in the genre of Middle English romance. They are central to romance narratives, but their ubiquitous presence is almost completely overlooked by the genre’s protagonists, and has been ... -
Light and the lens: streams of damaged consciousness in post-crash Irish modernist fiction
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)This thesis examines the state of Irish literature since the 2008-9 financial crash. I contend that, whilst a supposedly mature Realism was the dominant mode of Irish writing during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years of economic ... -
Horror of personality: exploring the gothicisation of mental illness in American fiction of the long 1950s
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)This thesis examines the gothicisation of mental illness — specifically, disorders of personality — in American fiction, as illustrated through four popular novels written in the long 1950s. In so doing, this thesis aims ... -
Condition of music and Anglophone influences in the poetry of Shao Xunmei
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-01-28)Shao Xunmei (1906-1968), a Chinese poet, publisher and translator, has long been marginalized by contemporary criticism. His unique poetics, especially when it comes to the condition of music in poetry, remains largely ... -
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 ...
