Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'British literature'
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Davies, L. V. L. "The tramp in British interwar literature." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2016. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1473969/.
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My thesis explores representations of the tramp in British literature during the interwar period. I argue that the figure of the tramp evolved out of the vagabond in response to industrialism, and propose the idea that the tramp symbolically denotes resistance to the goal driven logic of capitalism, as well as normative values that provide a supportive framework for growth within disciplinarian society. I propose that any attempt to speak negatively of tramps in a way that goes beyond a concern with their suffering betrays the underlying ideological agenda. Against this, I suggest that positive descriptions of the tramp might serve as a form of political protest against the productivist paradigm. My thesis then focusses on the interwar period in Britain; a time when unemployment soared, levels of homelessness rose, and the figure of the tramp gained prominence. I ask whether these texts denigrate or celebrate the tramp, and attempt to demonstrate how this ties into the individual contexts within which they were written. To do this, I centre on three manifestations of tramp writing during the interwar period: social exploration writing, the tramp memoir, and tramp fiction. In Chapter One I trace the origins of social exploration before introducing six interwar authors who disguised themselves as tramps in order to infiltrate and write about the tramp community. In Chapter Two I trace the history of tramp life-writing. I then introduce ten interwar memoirists – all of whom, though with a variety of backgrounds, self-identified as tramps. In Chapter Three I focus on six interwar novelists who feature the tramp in their work. In each chapter I provide biographical information for the various authors and consider critical responses to their work.
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Stein, Mark. "Black British literature : novels of transformation /." Columbus (Ohio) : the Ohio state university press, 2004. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb39937052q.
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Petty, Sue. "Working-class women and contemporary British literature." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2009. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/5441.
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This thesis involves a class-based literary criticism of working-class women s writing. I particularly focus on a selection of novels by three working-class women writers - Livi Michael, Caeia March and Joan Riley. Their work emerged in the 1980s, the era of Thatcherism, which is a definitive period in British history that spawned a renaissance of working-class literature. In my readings of the novels I look at three specific aspects of identity: gender, sexuality and race with the intersection of social class, to examine how issues of economic positioning impinge further on the experience of respectively being a woman, a lesbian and a black woman in contemporary British society. I also appropriate various feminist theories to argue for the continued relevance of social class in structuring women s lives in late capitalism. Working-class writing in general, and working-class women s writing in particular, has historically been under-represented in academic study, so that by highlighting the work of these three lesser known writers, and by indicating that they are worthy of study, this thesis is also complicit in an act of feminist historiography.
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Skipp, Jennifer Anne. "British eighteenth-century erotic literature : a reassessment." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.439581.
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Bottrill, Graham. "British socialist literature : from Chartism to Marxism." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2006. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55629/.
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This thesis is a selected narrative sequence, focusing upon social/political narratives published between 1870 and 1888 in order to connect the literature of Chartism, published in the 1840s and 1850s, with the naturalistic political novels of Margaret Harkness published between 1888 and 1921. The thesis was initially conceived during graduate study undertaken at the University of California in 1981-3. The foundations were fully laid by research undertaken independently during 1989 and 1990, while teaching in New York. Here, the truly inspiring facilities of the New York Public Library made it all real. The complications of returning to England in 1991 and the pressures of earning a living in a non-academic environment resulted in the study being left for many years, though not forgotten. I owe the completion of the thesis to its reception by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University in 2003, and to the rigorous and detailed support from my adviser, Professor Stephen Knight. I would also like to extend my thanks to the facilities of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy for supplying me with prints of rare microfilmed documents, available only from the British Library. Working on such a thesis as a part-time student in addition to full-time and largely unrelated work eats significantly into personal time. I therefore thank my partner, Ruth Hecht, for her support and positive encouragement throughout its composition. Finally, I would like to remember my family, the Bottrills, who lived for many generations between Coventry and Leicester, the men as farm labourers or coal miners in rural pits, the women in domestic service. They lived and worked throughout the period covered by this thesis, and to them ultimately it is dedicated.
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Lyons-McFarland, Helen Michelle. "Literary Objects in Eighteenth-Century British Literature." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1528822296580542.
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Sanchez-Arce, Ana Maria. "Authenticity and authenticism in recent British literature." Thesis, University of Hull, 2005. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.529005.
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Cooper, Jody. "Scaffold Fiction: Execution and Eighteenth-Century British Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20521.
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Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate.
The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth-century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers.
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Rudd, Andrew John. "Sentimental imperialism : British literature and India, 1770-1830." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.440619.
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Watson, Alex. "Romantic marginality : annotation in British literature, 1794-1818." Thesis, University of York, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.441054.
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Valman, Nadia Deborah. "Jews and gender in British literature 1815-1865." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1996. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1564.
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This thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious or racial difference in the Victorian period. The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered, looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of femininity and English national identity. It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and modern national unity. Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women. Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity. Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation, drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery. Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England movement of the 1840s.
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Isherwood, Ian Andrew. "The greater war : British memorial literature, 1918-1939." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2012. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3462/.
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This thesis concerns non-fiction ‘war books’ published in the inter-war period. War books were mostly written by participants in the First World War who contributed to Britain’s memory culture afterwards through the publication of their accounts. The war books catalogue represents diversity in terms of the experiences depicted and the geographic locations represented. Though they went through distinctive periods of popularity, war books were published throughout the inter-war period, and in great numbers. The publishing industry was receptive to martial literature and encouraged its publication. The breadth of the war books catalogue challenges the cultural uniformity of an ‘age of disillusionment’ by demonstrating the different ways that the war was remembered by its participants. War books had widespread interpretative breadth on the meaning of the war to veterans/participants in the years afterwards.
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Evans, Peter William Robert. "British and American socialist utopian literature, 1888-1900." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.681497.
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This dissertation studies socialist utopian literature published in Britain and America from 1888-1900. The central thesis is that they shared an underlying theoretical basis regarding how they were imagined to function, and why. Details obviously varied, but these texts shared a common structure which can be defined in terms of five interrelated themes: economics; ethics; environment; education; and evolution. These socialist utopias embodied a certain set of relations between these themes. Planned cooperative economies would be founded upon a socialist ethic inculcated by education and the environment, and the whole was posited as the product of historical evolution. These interrelated aspects were seen as the necessary foundations that would enable a socialist utopia - a united, harmonious society, characterised by association, community, and cooperation. This would convert society into a "community of interests", and an "administration of things", enabling collective democratic control of a socialist economy. This pattern can be found across the literature, underlying various strands of contemporary socialism and internal splits dividing the ideology. The most prominent of these, as manifested in utopian literature, was between state socialism and communitarian or libertarian socialist approaches. This divide is best encapsulated in the two most-famous examples, represented by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and William Morris' News from Nowhere respectively, which dominate existing secondary accounts. However, the differences between these two strands were not as great as often supposed. These complex issues have been approached through the prism of the key figure of Bellamy, and five of his respondents who are essentially unstudied. This is both because of the size of the literature (around 50 texts), but also Bellamy's overwhelming significance in existing secondary accounts, and to his contemporaries. Morris however is considered mainly as a touching-point in relation to other texts, there being little to add to existing accounts.
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Al-Hout, Ahmad. "E.M. Forster at home and abroad : British and non-British elements in his fiction." Thesis, University of Dundee, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.390681.
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Wright, Eamon David. "British women writers and race." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.298874.
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Lopez, John-David. "The British Romantic reconstruction of Spain." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1692097271&sid=19&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2008.Vita. Individual works cited are included for each chapter and are noted in the table of contents. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.
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Snider, Caleb. "Almost an Englishman: Black and British Identities in Three Contemporary British Novels." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28830.
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This project describes the work of three contemporary British novelists as they explore the possibility of self-identifying as black and British in contemporary Britain, despite the prevalence of racist attitudes that hold that these two identities are mutually exclusive. The three novels examined -- The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Brick Lane by Monica Ali -- present black protagonists who self-identify as British. While other characters in the novels either conform to assimilationist or diasporic models of identity, where the subject seeks to expunge all "black" characteristics in favour of conforming to stereotypical "white" cultural norms, or retreat from "white" characteristics into an essentialized version of the values of their "home" countries, Karim, Irie, and Nazneen establish spaces for themselves within British society that allow them to try on different identities. By acknowledging the variability of identity, all three protagonists are able to self-identify as being both black and British.
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Hunt, Adam Christopher. "The Captain of Industry in British literature, 1904-1920." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0026/NQ50035.pdf.
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Marchbanks, Paul R. Taylor Beverly Thornton Weldon. "Intimations of intellectual disability in nineteenth-century British literature." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,83.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006.Title from electronic title page (viewed Oct. 10, 2007). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English." Discipline: English; Department/School: English.
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Lembert, Alexandra. "The heritage of Hermes : alchemy in contemporary British literature /." Glienicke (Berlin) [u.a.] : Galda + Wilch, 2004. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0421/2004018978.html.
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Travis, Madelyn Judith. "Almost English : Jews and Jewishness in British children's literature." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/2231.
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This thesis examines constructions of Jews and Jewishness in British children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present. It demonstrates that this literature has often sought to determine the place of Jews in Britain, and that this endeavour is linked to attempts to define the English sense of self. This discourse is often politicised, with representations influenced as much by current events and political movements as by educational objectives. The main focus of the thesis is on works published from World War II through 2010, with Chapter One providing a historical context for the later material and offering an overview of key motifs from the eighteenth century to World War II. Works by authors such as Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling are discussed alongside rare texts which have not been examined before. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and heroes and villains reveal developments as well as continuities from earlier periods. The chapter on multiculturalism draws on unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, the late Eva Ibbotson and Ann Jungman. The sometimes competing and conflicting representations in literature which has been influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust, cultural diversity and 9/11 demonstrate that there has been no teleological progression over the centuries from anti-Semitism to acceptance, or from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’. Instead, many of the recurring themes in these texts reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. This tension is present in a substantial body of texts across age ranges, genres and time periods. It demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes which have taken place over two centuries.
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Choudhury, Suchitra. "Textile orientalisms : cashmere and paisley shawls in British literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5201/.
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Britain imported a vast number of cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were largely male garments in India at the time, which became popular dress accessories for British women. The demand for these shawls was opportune for textile manufacturers at home – particularly in Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley, who launched a thriving industry of shawls, ‘made in imitation of the Indian’. There has been considerable scholarship on cashmere shawls and their European copies in textile history. However, it has enjoyed no such prominence in literary studies. This PhD thesis examines Cashmere and ‘Paisley’ shawls in works of literature. Indian shawls are mentioned in a number of literary texts, including plays, poems, novels, opera, and satire. A wide variety of writers such as Richard Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Wilkie Collins (to name a few) depict these textiles in their works. For these writers, I argue, shawls provide a means to explore Britain’s changing social and imperial identity through the prism of material culture. The sheer incidence of ‘shawls’ in printed discourse furthermore suggests that they went beyond the realm of everyday fashion to constitute one of the important narratives of nineteenth-century Britain. In emphasising the significance of material culture and recovering new historical contexts, this investigation raises important questions relating to the links between industry and trade, and literary production. I rely on literary criticism, scholarship on India, and textile history to examine the phenomenon of cashmere shawls. In the wider context of postcolonialism, the research suggests that instead of the Saidian model which viewed the East as an abject ‘Other,’ colonies actually exerted a reverse and important influence on the imperial centre. A new emphasis on Indian things in literature, this work hopes, will contribute a fresh strand of thought to studies of imperialism.
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Jackson, Joseph Horgan. "Devolving black British theory : race and contemporary Scottish literature." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/47746/.
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The ‘black British movement’ is a consolidation of a diverse range of political, social and cultural priorities into a collective. Some of the more salient priorities include the opposition to British racism and imperialism, a challenge to hegemonic power and the invisibility of white ethnicity, and the eventual annihilation of the race concept itself. To ‘devolve’ this movement is to acknowledge some vital shortcomings in its critical practice. Firstly, an interrogation is needed of the assumptions that underpin the term ‘British’, specifically within a critique of racism and its derivatives. Secondly, the movement currently fails to thoroughly spatialise black British critique beyond the urban ‘metropole’ of London, and to a lesser extent, Birmingham; for instance, to the ‘margins’ of Scotland’s political, cultural and social milieu. Here, Scottish devolution provokes questions of how black Britishness might have become co-opted into a broader legitimation of ‘British’ culture. Literature has been a key site of contestation for black British cultural theory. Contemporary Scottish literature ‘writes back’ to the British management of difference through state-led multiculturalism and nationalism. Equally, the ‘Scottish Myth’ of egalitarianism, racelessness and a laissez-faire expectation of civic nationalism in Scotland are challenged by texts which foreground Scottish racism, whiteness and ethnocultural nationalism. In short, the texts featured herein expose and renegotiate the political practices of race, racism and culturalism in the context of two discourses of nation: Britain and Scotland.
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Bounds, Philip. "British Communism and the politics of literature, 1928-1939." Thesis, Swansea University, 2003. https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42543.
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This thesis examines the work of the most important literary critics and theorists who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period between 1928 and 1939. Its main concern is to provide a systematic and critical account of the communist understanding of the politics of literature. Its wider objective is to assess the ways in which the "Party theorists" were influenced by the CPGB's relationship with the world communist movement. The basic argument is that the work of the Party theorists had its roots in (1) the political strategies imposed on the CPGB throughout this period by the Communist International, and (2) the body of cultural doctrine enunciated by Soviet intellectuals at the famous Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934. I argue that the Party theorists responded creatively to these external influences, usually (though not always) by drawing on ideas from the British tradition of cultural criticism to develop Soviet doctrine in distinctive ways. Moreover, in spite of its debt to Soviet theory, much of the British work on literature and culture was noticeably unorthodox - sometimes consciously so, sometimes not. I argue that these ideas are consistent with the main principles of the so-called "revisionist" school of CPGB historiography which has emerged over the last 15 years. Chapter One surveys the period between 1928 and 1933 when the CPGB adhered to the Communist International's "Class Against Class" strategy. It focuses on (1) the work of the Anglo-Australian critic P. R. Stephensen, (2) the ideas about cultural crisis developed by John Strachey and Montagu Slater, and (3) the communist response to the prevailing fashion for cultural conservatism. Chapter Two provides an overview of the ideas explored at the Soviet Writers' Congress in 1934. Chapters Three, Four and Five examine the work of Alick West, Ralph Fox and Christopher Caudwell, the three men who are usually regarded as the founders of Marxist literary theory in Britain. Chapter Six explores the consequences for British cultural Marxism of the Communist International's "Popular Front" strategy against fascism. Its particular focus is the attempt of British communists to combat the influence of fascism by tracing the history of the "English radical tradition".
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Murtagh, Benjamin Daniel. "The portrayal of the British in traditional Malay literature." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2005. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28703/.
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This thesis examines the ways in which Malay authors portrayed the encounter with the British in a range of literary texts dating from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The study draws on Todorov's conception of monologism and dialogism together with ideas of postcolonial theoreticians to analyse the nature of the encounter. The main part of the thesis compares how certain phenomena, ideas and realities were comprehended and represented in traditional Malay literature prior to the arrival of the British, and how their understanding and representation changed or otherwise after the arrival of the British. The issues specifically discussed include the image of the world (chapter 3), concepts of justice (chapter 4), education and technology (chapter 5) and the portrayal of the individual (chapter 6). A close reading found that traditional conventions and formulae still predominated in the majority of texts portraying the British. Nonetheless, the traditional image of the world gradually changed over time, first incorporating British Bengal and then eventually the metropole itself. The understanding of justice and the attitude toward education and technology also underwent certain modifications. Even in the portrayal of individuals, albeit only British and not all of them at that, there appeared some features earlier unknown to traditional Malay literature. The conclusion argues that, contrary to previous suggestions, there was no typical understanding of the British in traditional Malay literature, and Malay authors from different times, locations and social milieus reacted to the British presence in a variety of ways. While many authors proved unable to engage with the British 'other', some of their brothers-in-penmanship did enter into a dialogue with the new ideas and new phenomena of the life brought about by the coming of this 'other'. The findings of this thesis are subsequently used to shed further light on the issue of the transition from the traditional to the modem in Malay literature.
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Ḥajarī, Hilāl. "Oman through British eyes : British travel writing on Oman from 1800 to 1970." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2662/.
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This thesis focuses on the images of Oman in British travel writing from 1800 to 1970. In texts that vary from travel accounts to sailors’ memoirs, complete travelogues, autobiographies, and letters, it looks at British representations of Oman as a place, people, and culture. It argues that these writings are heterogeneous and discontinuous throughout the periods under consideration. Offering diverse voices from British travellers, this thesis challenges Edward Said’s project in Orientalism (1978) which looks to Western discourse on the Middle East homogenisingly as Eurocentric and hostile. Chapter one explores and discusses the current Orientalist debate suggesting alternatives to the dilemma of Orientalism and providing a framework for the arguments in the ensuing chapters. Chapter two outlines the historical Omani-British relations, and examines the travel accounts and memoirs written by several British merchants and sailors who stopped in Muscat and other Omani coastal cities during their route from Britain to India and vice versa in the nineteenth century. Chapter three is concerned with the works of travellers who penetrated the Interior of Oman. James Wellsted’s Travels in Arabia (1838), Samuel Miles’ The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (1919) and other uncollected travel accounts, and Bertram Thomas’s Alarms and Excursions (1932) are investigated in this chapter. Chapter four considers the travellers who explored Dhofar in the southern Oman and the Ruba Al-Khali or the Empty Quarter. Precisely, it is devoted to Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix (1932) and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959). Chapter five looks at the last generation of British travellers who were in Oman from 1950 to 1970 employed either by oil companies or the Sultan Said bin Taimur. It explores Edward Henderson’s Arabian Destiny (1988), David Gwynne-James’s Letters from Oman (2001), and Ian Skeet’s Muscat and Oman (1974). This thesis concludes with final remarks on British travel writing on Oman and recommendations for future studies related to the subject. The gap of knowledge that this thesis undertakes to fill is that most of the texts under discussion have not been studied in any context.
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Ghaderi, Sohi Behzad. "Theatres of the mind : a comparative study of British romantic dramatists with five contemporary British dramatists." Thesis, University of Essex, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.337835.
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Huffels, Natalie. "The British trauma novel, 1791-1860." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114340.
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This dissertation argues that the British trauma novel emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, in response to the rise of individualistic conceptions of personal integrity and to the increasing value given to ordinary human life. Moments of intense suffering began at this point to register as shocking and traumatic violations of the boundaries of identity, and early- to mid-nineteenth-century trauma novels explore this cultural opposition between suffering and individuation. In such novels, individual boundaries are frequently imagined in architectural terms, while trauma is cast as a spatial violation of private territory. Although these texts provoke expectations of medical and narrative cures by combining scientific imagery with the marriage plot, they ultimately question the therapeutic teleology of medical science and the educative teleology of the bildungsroman and domestic novel. They instead locate the source of trauma in the bourgeois model of bound subjectivity propagated by both literature and science. This account of early- to mid-nineteenth-century novelistic trauma as a primarily spatial phenomenon differs from modern theories of trauma that focus on distortions in time. It reorients trauma scholarship away from the traumatic memory and towards the relationship between suffering and discrete selfhood. My first chapter argues that Elizabeth Inchbald's 1791 novel A Simple Story replicates and ironizes the eighteenth-century novelistic depiction of suffering as central to human subjectivity. In Chapters 2-4, I focus on nineteenth-century novels in which suffering instead becomes a traumatic violation of selfhood. In Mary Shelley's Matilda, trauma destroys the personal boundaries that block intimacy, so the protagonist keeps her wound open and refuses to heal. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens emphasizes the problematic dimensions of both bound bourgeois identity and inter-subjective working-class selfhood. In this novel, open models of personality engender repetitive violence, while bourgeois privacy creates the traumatic experience of unassimilable pain. In The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins implies that the boundaries protecting the individual self are illusory, as his characters are subjected to constant traumatic violations that negate coherent, self-directing identity. Each of these trauma novels expresses respect for the individual and compassion for human suffering, both of which characterized the valuation of ordinary life that arose at the turn of the nineteenth century. They nonetheless question whether atomistic subjectivity, conceived spatially in terms of rigid borders, is the best protection against psychological pain.Cette thèse soutient que le roman de trauma britannique a émergé au tournant du XIXe siècle en réponse à la montée des conceptions individualistes de l'intégrité personnelle et à la valeur croissante accordée à la vie humaine ordinaire. Les moments de souffrance intense ont commencé à être compris comme étant des violations choquantes et traumatisantes des frontières de l'identité, et les romans de trauma du début jusqu'au milieu du XIXe siècle contribuent à cette opposition culturelle entre la souffrance et l'individuation. Dans ces romans, les limites individuelles sont souvent imaginées en termes d'architecture et le traumatisme est présenté comme une violation du territoire privé. Bien que ces textes provoquent des attentes de guérison grâce aux traitements médicaux et au remède narratif, qui combinent l'imagerie scientifique avec le récit traditionnel du mariage, la téléologie thérapeutique de la science médicale, ainsi que la téléologie éducative du bildungsroman et du roman domestique, sont remis en cause. Le roman de trauma localise la source du traumatisme dans le modèle bourgeois de subjectivité close propagée dans la littérature et la science. Cette interprétation du traumatisme romanesque du début et du milieu du XIXe siècle comme étant un phénomène essentiellement spatial diffère des théories modernes de traumatisme qui mettent l'accent sur les distorsions dans le temps. Cette lecture éloigne le traumatisme de son association avec l'idée de la mémoire traumatique et le rapproche à la relation entre la souffrance et l'individualité discrète. Mon premier chapitre soutient que le roman d'Elizabeth Inchbald de 1791, A Simple Story, reproduit et ironise la représentation romanesque de la souffrance au XVIIIe siècle, quand elle était soulignée comme un élément central de la subjectivité humaine. Dans le deuxième et le quatrième chapitre, je me concentre sur des romans du XIXe siècle, dans lesquels la souffrance devient au contraire une violation traumatisante de l'individualité. Dans le roman Matilda de Mary Shelley, le trauma détruit les limites personnelles que bloque l'intimité, de sorte que le protagoniste conserve sa blessure ouverte et refuse de guérir. Dans A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens met l'accent à la fois sur les dimensions problématiques de l'identité close de la bourgeoisie et de l'identité intersubjective de la classe ouvrière. Dans ce roman, les modèles ouverts de la personnalité engendrent une violence répétitive, tandis que la vie privée bourgeoise crée l'expérience traumatisante de la douleur inassimilable. Dans The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins suggère que les frontières qui semblent défendre l'individu sont illusoires, car ses personnages sont soumis à des violations traumatiques constantes qui nient l'identité cohérente et autonome. Chacun de ces romans de trauma exprime le respect de l'individu et de la compassion pour la souffrance humaine, ce qui caractérise l'augmentation de la valeur attribuée à la vie ordinaire à la fin du XIXe siècle. Ils soulèvent néanmoins la question de savoir si la subjectivité atomistique, conçue spatialement en termes de frontières rigides, est la meilleure protection contre l'angoisse psychologique.
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Claydon, E. Anna. "Masculinity and the sixties British film." Thesis, University of Kent, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274320.
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Murphy, Robert. "British cinema in the 1960's." Thesis, University of Kent, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.278874.
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Perril, Simon. "Contemporary British poetry and modernist innovation." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.309700.
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Battles, Kelly Eileen. "The antiquarian impulse history, affect, and material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature /." Diss., Connect to online resource - MSU authorized users, 2008.
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Davison, Carol Margaret. "Gothic Cabala : the anti-semitic spectropoetics of British Gothic literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34941.
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The figure of the Wandering Jew in British Gothic literature has been generally regarded as a static and romantic Everyman who signifies religious punishment, remorse, and alienation. In that it fails to consider the fact that the legend of the Wandering Jew signalled a noteworthy historical shift from theological to racial anti-Semitism, this reading has overlooked the significance of this figure's specific ethno-religious aspect and its relation to the figure of the vampire. It has hindered, consequently, the recognition of the Wandering Jew's relevance to the "Jewish Question," a vital issue in the construction of British national identity. In this dissertation, I chronicle the "spectropoetics" of Gothic literature---how the spectres, of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt the British Gothic novel. I trace this "spectropoetics" through medieval anti-Semitism, and consider its significance in addressing anxieties about the Crypto-Jew and the Cabala's role in secret societies during two major historic events concurrent with the period of classic Gothic literature---the Spanish Inquisition, a narrative element featured in many Gothic works, and the French Revolution, a cataclysmic event to which many Gothic works responded. In the light of this complex of concerns, I examine the role of the Wandering Jew in five Gothic works---Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk (1795), William Godwin's St. Leon (1799), Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872), and Brain Stoker's Dracula (1897). In my conclusion, I delineate the vampiric Wandering Jew's "eternal" role in addressing nationalist concerns by examining his symbolic preeminence in Nazi Germany.
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Assinder, Semele Jessica Alice. "Greece in British women's writing, 1866-1915." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.608061.
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Storey, A. "Representations of class in modern British drama." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.370532.
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Wilson, Sara Curnow. "Unnaturalism: British Literary Naturalism Between the Wars." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2017. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/448805.
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EnglishPh.D.
My dissertation explores a turn in British literature back toward naturalism in the late modernist period, a literary move I call unnaturalism to refer to the way it resembles but deviates from the classic naturalist tradition of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, and George Orwell separately play with the form that can best merge literature and politics. The resulting novels—The Years (1937), Murphy (1938), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and Coming Up for Air (1939)—might not all look like naturalism, but they share a concern with determinism and social conditions, a tendency toward extreme external detail, and an engagement with contemporary scientific and medical discourse. Socially and politically engaged, these writers work to expose the mechanics behind the ‘natural’ order and reveal social determinism misrepresented as biological determinism. Rather than work to disprove or deny this way of understanding the world, the novels of my study complicate all singular understandings of human development. In short, these writers recover naturalist conventions in order to expose a functional determinism that is not rooted in biology—is not, in another word, natural—but rather constructed and reconstructed by contemporary discourses. By focusing on the details of the immediate, individual experience of women and economic or national outsiders, unnaturalists seek a more accurate presentation of the deep inequalities of society and the forces that keep them in place. In The Years, Woolf focuses on the way women continue to be limited by social norms despite the women’s rights developments of the early twentieth century (the professions were unbarred in 1919 and the Representation of the People Act of 1928 provided women with the same suffrage terms as men). In Murphy, Beckett gestures toward the growing field of experimental psychology, revealing the determinist assumptions on which the field relies. Rhys reveals similar assumptions in popular male depictions of women in Good Morning, Midnight as she addresses and revises Sigmund Freud’s “Femininity” and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Orwell looks at politics and language itself in Coming Up for Air, turning to sensory description as a way of working within a language tradition that he sees as keeping in place an anachronistic class system.
Temple University--Theses
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Sugars, Cynthia Conchita. "The uncompromised New World, Canadian literature and the British imaginary." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0016/NQ44602.pdf.
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Davison, Carol Margaret. "Gothic Cabala, the anti-semitic spectropoetics of British Gothic literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0002/NQ44401.pdf.
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Sugars, Cynthia Conchita 1963. "The uncompromised New World : Canadian literature and the British imaginary." Thesis, McGill University, 1998. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35630.
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This thesis explores contemporary (post-1980) British constructions of Canada or "Canadianness" as these have been conceived through the reading and reception of English-Canadian literary texts in Britain. I am arguing that in recent years Canada has been construed in Britain as an ideal, and furthermore, that this idealization has taken place in response to a perceived cultural and socio-economic malaise within contemporary British society. I use a combined postcolonial and object-relations approach to discuss the psychic investment involved in this construction of Canada as a post-imperial role model. These readers engage with the Canadian object as a sort of phantasy space, projecting onto Canada a self-image which expresses the British desire for postcolonial diversity. Canada thereby enables the dodging of the quagmires of imperiled national identity (and personal subjectivity), for its diffuse and decentralized makeup is balanced by an essentialized notion of cultural and national uniqueness. Throughout I take issue with the ways Canada tends to get celebrated in these writings as a postmodern ideal of unproblematized pluralism and endless diffusion, knowable by the sheer extent to which it seems to defy collective identity. These celebrations of Canada as a new (postmodern) Eden succeed only in emptying the Canadian domain of anything remotely contestatory or political. Indeed, this vision of Canada utilizes a limited version of postmodernism as an idealistic play of pluralities without any sense of accompanying political strife or contradiction.
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Gillies, M. A. "The influence of Henri Bergson on early modern British literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.384042.
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Ozumba, Kachi A. "Incarceration in Nigerian and British literature : creative and critical works." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.539082.
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Mason, Jon-Kris. "French language, and French manners, in eighteenth-century British literature." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.577523.
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Eighteenth-century social and political relationships between Britain and France have long enjoyed great scholarly interest, and the linguistic influence of French on English is being defined with increasing precision. Until now, however, there have been only brief stylistic considerations of the literary role played by French in eighteenth-century English prose literature. My thesis seeks to address that deficiency by investigating the literary usage and significance of French language in English literature. As the period is noted for the explosion of interest in language and its cultural ramifications; this study continuously considers the metonymical function of French usage as a signifier of broader social corollaries. This thesis attempts to forge a link between identifiable social attitudes and their incarnation in specific linguistic usage. I initially set out a context of opinion on French language and culture, and attitudes to borrowing and imitation, derived from journal, essay and treatise. Such a context demonstrates that France is unrivalled as the 'other' against which British identities were forged. Rates of lexical borrowing from French reached an historical low in the eighteenth century, and the proliferation of grammars and dictionaries bespoke a desire to define, limit, and control language. Yet the language of the developing novel, I argue, was inflected with French idiom, an idiom that offered a uniquely rich and potent strain of evocation and association. Writers of the novel, from Richardson and Smollett, to Brooke, and Burney, deploy French flexibly but with precision; each author exercises great control in borrowing idiom for purposes ranging from plot development and characterisation, to satire and pathos. My research explores those constructs, and because I found that the question of literary French usage is gendered, much of my thesis is structured along lines of gender. The letters of Lord Chesterfield, Samuel Johnson, and William Shenstone, Fanny Boscawen, Hannah More, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, form counterpoints to the novel, and establish areas both of commonality and divergence between French usage in the fictional and familiar prose of men and women. In its final chapter, this study turns explicitly to the wider social concerns underlying preceding discussions, viz. the significance of French usage to English manners and morals in the novels ranging from John Cleland's Fanny Hill to Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. This thesis necessarily incorporates extensive but germane quotation, and embraces historical sociolinguistics, social history, stylistics, literary theory, and practical literary criticism. While this study cannot claim to be comprehensive, it seeks to open out a field of study hitherto neglected.
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Johnson, Kathryn. "A dangerous age : adolescent agencies in inter-war British literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2000/.
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This thesis explores the creative synergy between an era of cultural flux and seismic social upheaval, and a life stage conceived of as fraught, transitional and poised between progress and regress. It contends that adolescence functioned as an organising trope and a dominant paradigm of modern subjectivity in diverse British novels of the period 1918-1939. I develop a wide-ranging thematic analysis which draws established luminaries of the inter-war literary canon into dialogue with neglected mavericks and ‘middlebrow’ authors including Rosamond Lehmann, Patrick Hamilton, E.H. Young, Stevie Smith and Walter Greenwood. The theorisation of adolescence by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and cultural critics including G.Stanley Hall, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Wyndham Lewis is canvassed in detail in Chapter I and provides a vital and enriching context for the close textual analyses which follow. Chapters III and V draw on original archival material to trace the evolution of distinctive adolescent agencies and visions of maturity in the striking inter-war novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene. Julia Kristeva’s reflections on the ‘adolescent novel’ and the mechanics of abjection offer salient points of illumination and debate in each chapter. These case-studies are elaborated and contextualised by close scrutiny of the gender differentials shaping literary constructions of adolescence in this era. Chapter IV takes inspiration from the parallel drawn by social psychologist Kurt Lewin between the adolescent and the socially disempowered or oppressed ‘marginal man’. In the light of theories of masochism, it calibrates the interrogative force of novels which accentuate the failures and sufferings of male adolescent protagonists. Chapter II gauges the radical aspirations towards female self-fulfilment and definition embedded in narratives of generational conflict and alliance between women and positions the post-war ‘modern girl’ as an enabling yet also peculiarly problematic avatar of female emancipation.
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Ferris, Natalie. "'Ludic passage' : abstraction in post-war British literature, 1945-1980." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5b3034e6-3a32-4684-b8a0-eb91cfc756c6.
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This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.
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Cherry, Peter James. "British Muslim masculinities in transcultural literature and film (1985-2012)." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22995.
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This thesis examines how novels and films by British writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage address the reshaping of masculinity through migration and interaction with other cultures within the UK. Drawing on a comparative critical framework that combines approaches from feminist, gender and masculinity studies, postcolonial, migration and transcultural studies, Islamic studies and literary and film theory, this thesis engages with five novels and four films that were written or released between 1985 and 2012, by British writers and filmmakers who were either born in a Muslim-majority nation or born to parents originating from a Muslim-majority country and who use their fictions to explore the presence and practices of Muslim cultures and communities in contemporary Britain. Through close analysis of work by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Sally El Hosaini, Ayub Khan-Din, Hanif Kureishi and Robin Yassin-Kassab, this thesis scrutinises how migrant and subsequent generations of postmigrant male protagonists construct their masculinity and how their conceptions of gender identity and performance are ‘translated’ into a British context amidst this century’s climate of Islamophobia and anti-migrant rhetoric, following events such as the Rushdie Affair, 9/11 and 7/7. In doing so, this thesis contends that through transnational movement and settlement conceptions of ‘Muslimness’, ‘Britishness’, and those of masculinity, are thrown into sharp relief and exposed as unstable and contingent constructs. By foregrounding the transcultural aesthetics and themes of this literary and cinematic corpus, however, I argue that this body of cultural production interrogates similarities and differences between the cultures they are positioned across. I use this transcultural approach to focus on how these texts depict father and son relations, religion, urban marginality and sexuality, and how through these foci, these novels creatively imagine new forms of masculinity that are forged through cultural contact, conflict and entanglement.
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Nash, Paul Stephen. "The idea of China in British literature, 1757 to 1785." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/17905.
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This thesis examines the idea of China in British literature during a clearly defined period. Between 1757 and 1785, when Britain still had little direct contact and cultural exchange with the Chinese, China evoked various attitudes, images and beliefs in the British imagination. At times uncertain and evasive, popular understandings of China were sufficiently malleable for writers of the period to knead into domestic political satire and social discourse, giving fresh expression to popular criticisms, philosophical aspirations, and religious tensions. The period presents several prominent English, Irish, and Scottish writers who use the idea of China precisely in this manner in writings as generically diverse as drama, translation, travel writing, pseudo-Oriental letters, novels, and fairy tales. Some invoke China’s supposed defects to accentuate Britain’s material, scientific, and moral progress, or to feed contemporary debate about decadence in British society and government. Others exploit the notion of a more civilized and virtuous China to satirize what they regard as a supercilious cultural milieu attendant on their own emerging polite and commercial society, or to interrogate their nation’s moral criteria of the highest good, public-spiritedness, or evolving global enterprise. All give the idea of China new currency in the dialectical interplay between literary appeals to antiquity and the pursuit of modernity, enlisting it in philosophical and theological debates of Enlightenment. This thesis will argue that its subject writers, including Arthur Murphy, Thomas Percy, Oliver Goldsmith, John Bell, and Horace Walpole, use the idea of China to help define a British identity as culturally and politically distinct from Europe, especially France, and to contemplate Britain’s place within global history and a broadening world view at mid-century.
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Bardi, Abby. "The gypsy as trope in victorian and modern British literature." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/7703.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of English. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Tredennick, Bianca Page. "Mortal remains : death and materiality in nineteenth-century British literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3061968.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Cordner, Sheila Connors. "Educational outliers: exclusion as innovation in nineteenth-century British literature." Thesis, Boston University, 2013. https://hdl.handle.net/2144/12740.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University
PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you.This dissertation traces a genealogy of literary resistance to dominant pedagogies in nineteenth-century Britain. Although politicians, religious leaders, and literary authors celebrated the expansion of schools for people outside of privileged classes, a persistent tradition of writers registers the loss of non-institutional forms of learning. Excluded from Oxford and Cambridge because of their class or gender, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf use their position outside of educational institutions to critique rote learning at universities for the elite as well as utilitarian schools for the masses. Hardy describes the "mental limitations" of Angel's Cambridge-educated brothers in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), for example, mocking them as "such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of systematic tuition." The radicalism of educational outliers emerges when read alongside educational pamphlets, working-men's club reports, college newspapers, and parliamentary debates. Educational outliers investigate the role that literature plays in un-teaching readers. They model alternative pedagogies centered on active learning instead of rote memorization. With Mansfield Park (1814), Austen inaugurates this tradition; at a time when proclamations on women's education proliferated, she offers novels as anti-treatises that constantly disrupt the reading experience instead of offering simplistic truths, forcing us to rely on our own judgment to make sense of the disorder that characterizes her model of self-education. Several decades later in her "novel-poem" Aurora Leigh (1856), Barrett Browning instructs us in a "headlong," empathic reading of her text as part of her experiential learning approach for women of different classes that stresses reform from within. Writing after more working-class schools had opened, Hardy tests the novel's capacity to un-teach assumptions about categories like "autodidact" itself and rewrites the celebratory self-made man's narrative by placing the reader in the position from which to weigh the positives and negatives of self-education. In the early twentieth century, Woolf imagines an education that "unfixes" students from their rigid class mindset in her "essay-novel" The Pargiters. Educational outliers' innovations ultimately prompt us to think about what outsiders' perspectives might be helpful today.
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Allen-Johnstone, Claire. "Dress, feminism, and British New Woman novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dd38da33-efbb-463f-86fd-9fcc1c4f707e.
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This thesis examines the close and complex relationship between dress, feminism, and British New Woman novels. It provides in-depth analysis of six New Woman novels and draws comparisons with numerous other works. The case study texts are Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man: Or Perhaps Only ... (1926, posthumously), Sarah Grand's Ideala: A Study from Life (1881) and The Heavenly Twins (1893), and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) and The Type-Writer Girl (1897). I explore why dress was so important to such novels, and examine the diverse, individual, developing, and shared ways in which authors engaged with dress as a feminist strategy and feminist concern. Areas considered include From Man to Man's use of functional clothes and dress production to celebrate female labour, Grand's interest in both dress reform and dressing to impress, Allen's shift in focus from the white-clad free lover to the sensibly-dressed working woman, and authors' use of deceptively clean clothes to address male immorality and disease. The thesis looks beyond as well as within New Woman narratives, demonstrating that writers, and publishers, were broadly concerned with dress in its various literal and more metaphorical manifestations. Focuses include self-styling, authorial cross-dressing, and bindings. Dress does not, however, always seamlessly support these texts' feminisms, I argue. For example, Grand elevated cross-class feminism, but she belittled middle-class women's taste, side-lined poor women's most pressing sartorial concerns, and dressed to impress. I also stress that dress, being so closely bound up with New Woman novels' feminisms and their ambiguities, is a revealing lens through which to read such texts, and one often capable of prompting re-readings. Attention to Allen's rejection of sartorial realism in parts of The Woman Who Did problematises the dominant conception of this novel as straightforwardly pro-free union, for instance. The thesis, as well as gesturing towards dress's centrality to the production and interpretation of literary feminisms and anti-feminisms broadly, emphasises the importance of dress to New Woman literature and its analysts, and uses dress to provide fresh readings of various novels and genre-wide issues.