Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
Recent Submissions
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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 ... -
Absurd black humour as social criticism in contemporary European cinema
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)This thesis investigates how contemporary European art cinema establishes an absurd worldview to express social criticism that can be read as evidence of – as well as a response to – European socio-political crises. The ... -
Socialist Realist theatre in the Soviet Union in the 1930s: forming a social identity
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)The aim of this thesis is to use the socialist realist theatre example to examine the theatre’s ability to form social identities. This is a difficult task because, for a start, the theory has failed – thus far – to give ... -
Transformation of the Syrian business community after the 2011 uprising: the formation of a war-induced business diaspora and the reorganisation of their networks
(The University of Edinburgh, 2018-07-07)This thesis aims to analyse how the Syrian business community has been transformed by the 2011 revolution and how this transformation has had an impact on Syrian business networks. The thesis draws on a range of previous ... -
Neoliberalism and language shift: the Great Recession and the sociolinguistic vitality of Ireland's Gaeltacht, 2008-18
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)The tendency of macro-level economic forces to drive language shift is frequently referred to in scholarship on language planning and policy (LPP). Despite this, there has, to date, been very little research that attempts ... -
'The stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true': feminist rewriting in the Canongate Myths Series
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-02)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 ... -
Revolution in pain(t): a semiotic reading of Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda posters and female motivated violence (1966-1968)
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-29)This thesis focuses on visual imagery and culture from Maoist China by exploring new methods for interpreting the propaganda posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR) through a linguistic-based methodology. In ...
