Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
Recent Submissions
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Terrorism and realism in contemporary Italian literature: the victim as a literary character and a cultural paradigm
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This thesis explores the idea of victimhood in Italian literary representations of terrorism, looking at its relationship with realism. More specifically, I focus on the period of Italian political terrorism in the ... -
Geolinguistic variation of Hebridean Gaelic: the role of nominal morphology
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This thesis investigates the geographical variation of inflectional markers used in noun phrases by speakers of Scottish Gaelic. I focus on the traditional vernacular and therefore the data represent the speech of older ... -
Reading, talking and playing literature: community literary practices of the UK Russian-speaking diaspora
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This thesis is an ethnographic study of the Russophone community literary life in Britain focusing on the Waterstones’ Russian Book Club (WRBC), the largest book club of its kind in the country. The WRBC began its ... -
Early modern blush: bodies and boundaries c.1590-1700
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This thesis contains four case-studies on the blush in four different genres — narrative poetry; drama; sermons; and epic poetry. My aim is to preserve the idiosyncrasies and conventions of how each genre treats the ... -
You must believe in spring, and Subverting causality: repetition and readers in Muriel Spark’s work
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)You Must Believe in Spring is a bildungsroman that follows three days of Shahed’s life in Egypt. Set in the near-future – early 2030’s – it deals with themes of revolution, alienation and privilege. Being a disciple ... -
Poetry of sight: literary contexts of the Mahāyāna imaginaire
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This thesis is a study of the visually spectacular aspects of Mahāyāna sūtra literature, and closely related Buddhist Sanskrit materials, from the 1st century BCE to the 4th / 5th century CE approximately. While the early ... -
Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poetics of sympathy
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-11-07)Ideas of sympathy are central to developments of Enlightenment moral and political thought, as the discourse of sympathy negotiates tensions of the rational and sentimental philosophical traditions. This thesis examines ... -
Memoirs of a cyborg: American autobiography as a genre of the (post)human
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This dissertation will look at the relationship between autobiography and the construction of the American subject. The introduction will outline the parameters of the genre and its shared history with the discourses ... -
Late night double feature: queer monstrosity and cult cinema
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)Cult cinema from the 1970s to the present day is filled with images of monstrous transgression. These images of monsters frequently represent a transgressive queer sensibility and a spectrum of identities and sexualities ... -
Maimed ones: Wordsworth and Late Modernism
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-07)This thesis is an account of how the poetry of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) offered a horizon for very different post-war English poets working in, through and after explicitly modernist poetic traditions. It aims ... -
Domestication of wolves & 'Intimate with madness': metaphors for the mind and mental illness in confessional poetry
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)‘The Domestication of Wolves’ is a collection of poems written, revised, and assembled during the four-year period of my PhD. My writing has been informed and guided by the work of the Confessional poets Anne Sexton, ... -
'This is not what being a woman means': female identity in American narratives from 1960 to 1970
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-02-07)The project will examine literary representations of the female consciousness in American prose narratives of the 1960s. Addressing the different iterations of female identities and feminist politics in light of broader ... -
Red Scare in China: caricatures, anti-Communist propaganda, and the foreign press in the interwar Shanghai, 1924-1937
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)One of the most defining processes for China during the early 20th century was the nearly two-decades-long conflict between Nationalists and Communists. To better understand this pivotal rivalry, this thesis explores the ... -
Dimensions of memory objects and spaces in novels by Grass, Perec, Modiano and Walser
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Arguing that embodied human experience of the physical world has shaped thought and language used in relation to memory, this thesis asserts the importance of not only the metaphors of the storehouse and the writing-surface ... -
Estranging history: alterity and capitalism in speculative fiction
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko Suvin’s paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple subgenres in terms ... -
Stream of consciousness' and feminist narratives in Republican Chinese women's literature
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Relocating the originally Western notion of “stream-of-consciousness” (SOC) to Republican China, this study examines this narrative style in Republican women’s literature from the perspective of feminist narratives. ... -
Figure of the flirt in American fiction from 1868 - 1928
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This thesis examines depictions of the flirt figure in American fiction from 1868-1928, a period where flirtatious femininity was increasingly becoming a subject of social concern. The flirt has often been ignored in ... -
Always erase and Renegade poets: Écriture féminine and the poetry of Medbh McGuckian and Louise Glück
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)The poems in Always Erase are concerned with arrival, in every sense of the word, and with the transition from one life stage into the next. The poems celebrate a strong maternal inheritance as I aim to define aspects ... -
Luckenbooth and The metamorphosis of a novel (inspired by Kafka's The Metamorphosis)
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)Luckenbooth is a novel inspired by Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It is set in an Edinburgh tenement building and concerns the metamorphosis of the residents’ lives over nine decades. The purpose of setting the novel over ... -
Currents of Hope': connecting the socialist literature of William Morris with the radical works of William Cobbett, Robert Owen and Ernest Jones
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)The aim of this thesis is to articulate both the nature and the importance of the connection between the socialist writing of William Morris and the work of three specific figures associated with early-to-mid ...
