Literatures, Languages, and Cultures PhD thesis collection
Recent Submissions
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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 ... -
Priorities, visions, identities, and normative approaches: a corpus-driven discourse analysis of the official discourse between China and the EU (1994-2019)
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This thesis takes a language-oriented constructivist perspective contending that language has a shaping or constructing role in creating patterns and norms in a relationship as language and social realities are mutually ... -
Authoritarianism reconstituted: ‘hollow statism’ and the crackdown on Islamic movements in Sisi’s Egypt
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This dissertation analyses state-society relations in Egypt, focusing on Islamic movements and their social and religious service provision, as a lens to track changes in the form of authoritarianism deployed under the ... -
Defective online public opinion? Analyzing effectiveness and validity of Chinese online public expression: a case study of 2015 Tianjin explosion
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)The internet has developed rapidly since it entered China in the late 1980s. With the assistance of major online news portals, more and more Chinese people can join online discussions on public affairs. Existing research ... -
What are they worth? A holistic exploration of the Lewis chessmen and the values placed upon them
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Humans interact with objects in every part of their daily lives and have been doing so for millennia. The oldest recorded objects are stone tools that were created over 3.3 million years ago and predate the timeline of ... -
Ecology, inheritance, legacy: birds and temporality in the 1960s and the contemporary literary imagination
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This thesis examines the interface of literature and birdlife as a means to interrogate the relationship between literary inheritance and ecological legacy. Perhaps more than any other animal, birds have a strong literary ... -
Fatimid historiography and its survival. A case study of the vizierate of al-Yāzūrī (r. 442-450/1050-1058)
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Studies of Fatimid history often take the testimony of later historians like al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) for granted. This thesis will look closely at how later historians used sources and what this can teach us about Fatimid ... -
Given to the River' and 'Form, Context and Tone in Eliot, Auden and MacNeice'
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Given to the River is a collection of poetry in which I explore themes of landscape, memory, mortality and the passage of time. Predominantly comprising lyric poetry in free verse, the collection also features some ... -
Thread and blood: the fabrication of female devotion in medieval english literature
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This thesis explores the representation and development of female devotion through textiles in medieval English literature. Drawing from a broad range of texts that can be termed as “devotional” narratives (including lives ... -
Most difficult and least glamorous: the politics of style in the late works of Nadine Gordimer
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Much of the established scholarship on Nadine Gordimer regards her as a chronicler of the injustices of apartheid, as scholars like Stephen Clingman and Dominic Head describe her mature works as writing ‘history from the ... -
From novel to network: digital intertextuality in twenty-first-century fiction and fanfiction
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Literature has never existed in isolation, from other texts, from the circumstances of its creation or from effecting change. While the prominence of the novel form is partly responsible for the idea that works of literature ... -
Profitable reading of newspapers: Thomas Hardy and mass media culture
(The University of Edinburgh, 2018-11-26)This thesis examines the ways in which the development and repercussions of the evolving nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical press, and the mass media culture it generated, can be found exemplified in the works ... -
Becoming woman in the land of women: investigating the paradigm of the individual versus the collective in contemporary feminist utopianism
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Studies in feminist utopianism have demonstrated how this literary current provides fertile ground for critiquing masculine hegemonies and imagining new ways of being. A central aspect of recent feminist debates, which ... -
Empire on which the Sun Sets: Europeans and non-Europeans in Robert Southey's Works on Latin America and the Caribbean
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This thesis examines the portrayal of the encounters between Europeans and non Europeans of the American continent in the works of Robert Southey. The thesis argues that Southey’s representations of European/non-European ... -
Chilean film festivals: promotors of film culture and cinephilia in Chile
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This thesis addresses the role of film festivals in Chile in creating, promoting, and consolidating film culture in Chile since its first initiatives emerged in the 1950s to the end of the 2010s. This thesis focuses on the ... -
The ghosts that visit us as we dream and Figurative homelands: second-generation immigrant experiences in North American contemporary poetry
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)The Ghosts That Visit Us as We Dream is a poetic manuscript that observes my family’s immigration from Tanzania to Canada. The poems are voiced from a variety of familial perspectives to capture how identity reforms ... -
Transgender gaze, neoliberal haze: the impact of neoliberalism on trans female bodies in the anglophone global north
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)This thesis analyses the impact of neoliberalism on trans female bodies, in recognition of a warning by trans studies scholar Dean Spade that identifies how “activists and theorists have tended to miss the vital connection ... -
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 ...
