Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
Recent Submissions
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Leftist-Sadrist alliance: social movements and strategic politics in Iraq
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)This thesis explores the formation of the leftist-Sadrist alliance that won Iraq’s May 2018 national elections. It argues that this cross-ideological social movement coalition was neither a case of two groups always ... -
'Fair copies?’ Titus Oates and the forging of literary politics in Seventeenth-Century England
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)In recent decades a resurgent History of the Book has helped to challenge the idea that the printed page is one constituted by words alone. Similarly, for all its critical indeterminacy the methods of New Historicism ... -
Bite of Taiwan culinary intimacy in contemporary Taiwanese food narratives
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)This thesis examines the trope of intimacy in an array of food narratives – including prose essays, novels, autobiographical accounts, travelogues, and pictorial books – published in Taiwan since the 1990s. By focusing on ... -
Devour Everything and ‘A Landscape of Mutability and Ferocious Life’: Mark Doty and Jo Shapcott’s poetics of illness
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)Devour Everything is a collection of poetry written and collated over a period of three years, in which I explore a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: illness and bodily frailty, suppressed female voices, ... -
Deconstructing Chinese online community: users' participation in Bilibili live stream channels
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)Current studies of the Chinese Internet and society describe Chinese Internet users’ activities as the mobility transferred from the offline to the online world. They also regard the Chinese Internet and Communication ... -
The history and doctrines of the Karrāmiyya sect with special reference to ar-Rāzī's criticism
(The University of Edinburgh, 1970-06)The objective of this thesis is the study of the history and doctrines of one of the Muslim sects namely the Karramiyya sect, with special attention made to Fakhr ad-Dln ar-RazI's criticism of the sect's doctrines and ... -
Nickie-Ben's Close and The Devil loves Scotland: Devil influence in Scottish history and literature, and Nickie-Ben's Close
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-29)The novel Nickie-Ben's Close is a magical realism bildungsroman that takes the existing Devil archetype and reimagines him in a story set in modern-day Edinburgh, Scotland. Through the first person perspective of our ... -
Language provision in Scottish public services: inclusion in policy and in practice
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-29)Increased international mobility has resulted in language planning initiatives by a range of different actors in Scotland, in order to respond to the growing linguistic diversity of the population and to promote greater ... -
Lunfardo and gendered discourse: creation and analysis of a linguistic corpus of tango lyrics
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-29)This thesis explores the question of how language is used to construct gender in tango lyrics, and it specifically examines lunfardo cultural markers and explores the ways in which these contribute to gendered discourse ... -
Cinema and Heidegger: the call to being in Ozu, Antonioni, Tarr
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-22)In close dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s early ontology (Being and Time, 1927) and his metaphysics (“What is Metaphysics?”, 1929; Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935), this thesis argues that cinema offers a privileged ... -
Nostalgia re-written. Boris Akunin's Fandorin project and the detective (re-)discovery of Empire
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-15)Since his rise to fame in 1998, Boris Akunin has become a household name on the post-Soviet book market. Temporarily, he also became one of the leading voices in Russia’s liberal opposition movement to the Putin regime. ... -
'Less like a wall': negotiating asylum in contemporary Australian and UK reality theatre
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)This thesis takes as its starting point Elaine Scarry’s theorisation of the benign room, which enables civilisation by acting as a filtering mediator between the body and the world. With this theoretical underpinning, I ... -
Aspects of the historical phonology of Manx
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-29)This thesis elucidates some of the hitherto poorly understood aspects of the diachronic development of Manx phonology. By tracing phonological changes from earlier varieties of Gaelic, and within the attested period of ... -
Poetry as a way of being: poetics of care in Heidegger, Emerson, Wordsworth, and Cavell
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-29)This thesis investigates the idea that care is a notion that is relevant to the study of literary theory, its history, and the study of literature, especially poetry and poetics. Care is as a notion under which are ... -
Dostoevsky's storm and stress: Notes from Underground and the psychological foundations of Utopia
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-29)Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky’s most intense examination of the fundamental psychological basis of society and politics, and was conceived as a polemical response to the utopian socialism of Nihilists like Nikolai ... -
Modernist literature at the museum: history, memory, and aesthetics in Proust, James, and Joyce
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-29)This thesis brings together three well-known authors of the early 20th century, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, in order to explore the similarities and divergences in their work when it comes to the treatment ... -
Of all the places - a novel & A life in search of a narrative: the construction of narrative identity in the autobiographical fiction of J.M. Coetzee.
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)A novel – Of All the Places. Drawing on parallels between apartheid South Africa and the present far-right politics of Italy, Of All the Places explores matters of race, nationalism, and language, and the inevitable ... -
Mapping Middle-earth: tracing environmental and political narratives in the literary geographies and cartographies of J.R.R Tolkien's Legendarium
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-30)In 1954, shortly before the publication of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to friend and author Naomi Mitchison, “I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit” (Letters 177). This reciprocal relationship ... -
Collaborative individualisms in the autobiographical writings of H.D., Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Emily Coleman
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)In this thesis I investigate how far ‘collaboration’ can be used an aesthetic interpretative category to examine the subjectivities narrated in the autobiographical writing of H.D., Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and ... -
'The stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true': feminist rewriting in the Canongate Myths series
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)In 2005, Canongate, an Edinburgh-based publisher, launched the first volumes in the Canongate Myths series, a project which commissioned renowned authors to retell ancient mythologies for contemporary audiences. Securing ...
