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Schmitt, Franziska. ""Method in the fragments" fragmentarische Strategien in der englischen und deutschen Romantik." Trier WVT, Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2005. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2663927&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Harland, Rachel Fiona. "The depiction of crowds in 1930s German narrative fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c8357884-eaf2-4daf-987b-82539148b38b.
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This study of 1930s German fiction adds a new dimension to existing scholarship on the depiction of crowds in literature. Whereas previous surveys on the topic have predominantly focused on the crowd as a revolutionary phenomenon judged on the basis of class perspectives, or as a feature of mass society, this investigation deals specifically with reactions to the crowd in its incarnation as a manifestation of and symbol for political fascism. Drawing on a number of contemporaneous theoretical treatises on crowds and mass psychology, it seeks to demonstrate that war, extreme socio-political upheaval and the rise of Nazism produced intense multidisciplinary engagement with the subject among German-speaking intellectuals of the period, and examines the portrayal of crowds in works by selected literary authors in this context. Exploring the interplay between literature and concurrent theoretical works, the thesis asks how writers used specific possibilities of fiction to engage with the theme of the crowd at a time when the worth of art was often questioned by literary authors themselves. In doing so, it challenges the implication of earlier criticism that authors uncritically appropriated the findings of theoretical texts for fictional purposes. At the same time, it becomes clear that although some literary crowd portrayals support a distinction between the nature of theoretical and literary writing, certain crowd theories are as imaginative as they are positivistic. Extrapolating from textual comparisons, the thesis thus challenges the view held by some authors that knowledge produced by theoretical enquiry was somehow truer and more valuable than artistic responses to the politics of the age.
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Thomas, Nicola. "Landscape, space and place in English- and German-language poetry, 1960-1975." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/41884/.
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This thesis examines representations of space, place and landscape in English and German-language poetry of the period 1960-1975, a key transitional phase between modernity and postmodernity. It proposes that the impact certain transnational spatial revolutions had on contemporary poetry can only be fully grasped with recourse to comparative methodologies which look across national borders. This is demonstrated by a series of paired case studies which examine the work of J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan, Sarah Kirsch and Derek Mahon, and Ernst Jandl and Edwin Morgan. Prynne and Celan’s 'Sprachskepsis' is the starting point for a post-structuralist analysis of meta-textual space in their work, including how poetry’s complex tectonics addresses multifaceted crises of representation. Mahon and Kirsch’s work is read in the context of spatial division, and it is argued that both use representations of landscape, space and place to express political engagement, and to negotiate fraught ideas of home, community and world. Jandl and Morgan’s representations of space and place, which often depend on experimental lyric subjectivity, are examined: it is argued that poetic subject(s) which speak from multiple perspectives (or none) serve as a means of reconfiguring poetry’s relationship to space at a time when social, literary and political boundaries were being redefined. The thesis thus highlights hitherto underexplored connections between a range of poets working across the two language areas, making clear that space and place is a vital critical category for understanding poetry of this period, including both experimental and non-experimental work. It reveals weaknesses in existing critical taxonomies, arguing for the use of ‘late modernist’ as category with cross-cultural relevance, and promotes methodological exchange between the Anglophone and German traditions of landscape, space and place-oriented poetry scholarship, to the benefit of both.
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Oliver, Emily Kate. "Shakespeare and German reunification : the interface of politics and performance." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4641/.
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The thesis examines the relationship between politics and Shakespeare performance in eastern Germany before, during, and after reunification in 1990. Distancing itself from the assumption that performance acts as a directly influential political tool, it situates theatre practitioners and institutions within their economic, political, and cultural contexts. By analysing a wide range of case studies from Berlin as well as more peripheral towns and cities, I argue that German Shakespeare performance’s capacity for political intervention, both before and after reunification, was limited by theatre practitioners’ reliance on public funding, their close relationships with governmental authority, and an underlying distrust of the people (Volk). Ultimately, East German theatre practitioners proved useful to the 1989 protest movement precisely because they occupied a unique position at the interface of dissidence and state power. I begin by situating my study within the tradition of reading Hamlet as an allegory for the German struggle between Geist (intellect) and Macht (power). Each following chapter examines Shakespeare productions between 1980 and 2000 from a different perspective. Chapter 2 considers the impact of public funding on theatre practice in the GDR, and theatre’s struggle for economic survival following reunification. Chapter 3 examines theatre’s shifting relationships with political authority by investigating East German censorship practices, theatre practitioners’ involvement with the 1989 protest movement, and attempts to connect Shakespeare performance with politics in reunified Germany. Chapter 4 analyses competing theatre aesthetics in relation to their function, methodology, and intended audience, examining how these translated into theatre practice. The thesis concludes by considering Shakespeare’s role in memorialising East German theatre practice.
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Gardiner, Monte. "Malwida von Meysenbug's Memoirs of an Idealist. Translation of Memoiren einer Idealistin." BYU ScholarsArchive, 1999. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6662.
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The following translation is the first full length rendering of Malwida von Meysenbug's two-volume autobiography Memoiren einer Idealistin/Eine Reise nach Ostende into English. Meysenbug, who boasts ties to Nietzsche, Wagner, Herzen, and Saffi, was forerunner to a long line of female social democrats. She was an eyewitness to the tumultuous political events surrounding the German Revolution of 1848, and is remembered as a pioneer in education and gender issues. Meysenbug's memoirs depict nineteenth-century Europe in a dynamic state of transformation. This is a time of opposition and contradiction, when emerging philosophies and political movements vie for power with existing structures. European governments are forced to implement social reforms in an effort to avert insurrections and political catastrophe. In Germany, the influence of organized religion begins to wane, giving way to a generation of free thinkers who combine elements of the German classical and romantic periods with Marxist and other materialist world views.
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Matthes, Frauke. "Writing and Muslim identity : representations of Islam in German and English transcultural literature, 1990-2006." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29252.
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This thesis examines the interaction between travel, translation and gender in relation to Islam in German and English transcultural literature. The aim is to explore how German- and English-language authors, Muslim and non-Muslim approach notions of physical and metaphorical movement, (cultural) translation (the means of communicating between cultures, languages and religions, and between a migrant’s traveller’s heritage and present), and the significance of gender constructions in contemporary fictive and semi-fictive writing of travel and migration. In my comparative reading of the selected texts, which is guided by postcolonial criticism, I evaluate the similarities and differences between German and English transcultural writing, whilst paying particular attention to the role of Islam in these texts. The first two chapters focus on movement. In the first chapter on migration writing (Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Monica Ali), I analyse what happens when Islam ‘moves’. I ask how the writers approach first-generation Muslim migration and constructions of ‘home’, primarily from their female protagonists’ point of view. The second chapter on pilgrimage and hajj (V. S. Naipaul and Ilija Trojanow) looks into the idea of travelling to Islam, to its ‘heart’ (Mecca and Medina) as well as to its peripheries (non-Arab Muslim countries), and the textualisation of the journeys. The emphasis of the subsequent two chapters shifts to gender issues of the generation that ‘has arrived’ (post-migrants). The third chapter is an examination of the perceptions of the relationship between Islam, ‘difference’ and masculinity among young male Muslims (in texts by Feridun Zaimoğlu and Hanif Kureishi). Chapter four explores the interaction between language, gender and Islam (in the work of Özdamar, Zaimoğlu and Leila Aboulela).
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Mikus, Birgit. "The political woman in German women's writing 1845-1919." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:31c15d04-aa94-4ab8-8b91-368731b77538.
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This thesis analyses the depiction and its function of politically active women in novels by six female authors from the margins of the democratic revolution of 1848 and the first German women’s movement. The thesis asks (i) what their political stance was in relation to democratic developments and women’s rights, (ii) how they rendered their political convictions into literary form, (iii) which literary images they used, criticised, or invented in order to depict politically active women in their novels in a positive light, and (iv) which narrative strategies they employed to ‘smuggle’ politically and socially radical ideas into what were sometimes only ostensibly conventional plots. The thesis combines intertextual analysis with poetic analyses of individual texts in order to highlight deviant elements in narrative strategy, imagery, or text-internal appraisals by the narrator or author. In order to contextualise the chosen texts as well as my analyses, it draws on the historical environment (social and legal developments, revolutions, technological progress) for the definition of what can be considered radical and political in the period 1845-1919. Additionally, the thesis is firmly grounded in feminist theory, which provides the instruments for highlighting the concepts and circumstances in which the six authors’ works are situated. The essays and novels analysed were written before feminist theory was established; however, their proto-feminist observations, demands, and discursive tactics contributed much to the formation and institutionalisation of feminist thought and, ultimately, theory. In their efforts to construct a positive role model for the political woman, the six authors chosen are united in their notion that such a role model should evolve from bourgeois values of family and work ethics, but the examples manifested in their novels show a great variety of degrees of radicalism.
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Spiers, Emily. "'Alpha-Mädchen sind wir alle' (we're all Alpha Girls) : subjectivity and agency in contemporary pop-feminist writing in the US, Britain and Germany." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:21fd8597-82a0-40e7-9a21-fdcd3da27641.
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This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.
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Dunn, Abigail. "The depiction of the widow in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:366c6541-25b7-4cb7-a5f1-8889d3b4c1d9.
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This thesis examines the depiction of the widow by men and women in novels and short stories written between 1842 and 1913. The representation of the widow is analysed in the context of dominant views about widowhood at the time, such as those expressed in the writings of politician and statesman, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-1796). These ideas are set out in chapter I. The first chapter also examines the social reality of widowhood in nineteenth-century Germany. In the first chapter of the thesis Hippel argues that real widows are superfluous beings and men’s second-hand goods, but they were also perceived by theologians and moralists of the time as a threat due to their ungoverned lust. Many nineteenth-century widows internalised the idea espoused by Hippel and felt alienated and invisible. In German fiction, however, male writers in the works discussed repeat the latter theory that once deprived of their husbands widows are sexually voracious. In the works written by men, the figure of the widow is generally presented as a dangerous sexual predator. Female authors, however, highlight the invisibility of the widow and portray her as a figure alienated from society and her family. Henriette Hanke is the first author to be examined in chapter II. Her novel, Die Wittwen (1842), portrays five widows, who range from the self-sacrificing Lucie von Gardemer, to the liberated and financially independent Frau von Kleist. Hanke depicts widowhood as a process of education for her two key widows, Lucie von Gardemer and Franzisca Weihland. They must learn to love the right man, and at the end of the story they revert from widowhood to marriage. Fourteen years later, the first version of Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55) was published. Chapter III explores the way in which Keller portrays the threatening sexuality of his widow Judith and emphasises her power to destabilise the narrator. Chapters IV and V also focus on the widow as a predatory and dangerous figure, as exemplified in works by Paul Heyse, Eduard Grisebach, C. F. Meyer and Arthur Schnitzler. In chapter VI Hedwig Dohm presents a contrast to the dominant representations of widowhood in her story Werde, die du bist! (1896). Dohm challenges prevalent stereotypes of the widow, though with limited success. Gabriele Reuter, the final author to be discussed, reverts to male stereotypes of the widow in her stories. This chapter thus shows that women writers are not always more positive, or original, in their representation of the widow. The thesis as a whole demonstrates the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the widow in nineteenth-century German fiction. She is a figure to be at best re-educated and at worst to be feared and guarded against. She is a cynical man-trap in Heyse’s and Grisebach’s stories, a murderess in Meyer’s story, and an incestuous mother in Schnitzler’s texts. Hanke and Dohm, themselves both widows, show from the inside what it is like to be a widow in such a society.
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Corrigan, Patsy Kay Looney. "Translation of Ilse Aichinger's short stories." PDXScholar, 1985. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3418.
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Translations of three of Ilse Aichinger's stories which originally appeared in the book Eliza, Eliza are presented in this thesis. The three stories translated are "Herodes," "Port Sing," and "Die Puppe."
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Collins, Matthew Graham. "The fiction of Franz Nabl in literary context : a re-examination." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:67478695-5e36-41c3-be68-bd5857e33a2d.
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This thesis re-evaluates the work of the neglected Austrian novelist Franz Nabl. Nabl’s reputation has long been overshadowed by the prestige of Jung-Wien, denigrated by inaccurate association with the Heimatroman, and even unjustly tarnished by his appropriation during National Socialism. My work aims to correct these misconceptions, demonstrating that his best fiction merits rehabilitation not only in its own right, but also for the important questions it raises about conventional narratives of Austrian literary history. Structured chronologically, the five chapters of this thesis provide fresh analyses of Nabl’s texts, many of which have previously received only scant scholarly attention. These close readings are located in a range of relevant literary-historical and cultural contexts, illustrating that Nabl’s writing not only belongs in surprising literary company, but also that his works fit into important, yet often overlooked patterns in Austrian literary history which are often obscured by a tradition of criticism which values ‘modernism’ over ‘realism’, and privileges the aesthetically progressive over the apparently conservative. The first chapter investigates Nabl’s earliest fiction in the literary and cultural context of fin-de-siècle Vienna, revealing unexpected connections between Nabl and acknowledged modernists, such as Schnitzler and Kafka. The second and third chapters engage with Nabl’s novels, Ödhof and Das Grab des Lebendigen, establishing his status as a significant critical realist within a long tradition of Austrian works exploring unhappy family life. The fourth chapter focuses on the misleading view of Nabl as a regionalist, demonstrating that, while not all Heimat novels deserve critical condemnation, Nabl’s narratives of rural life invoke the conventions of the Heimatroman only to disappoint them. In the last chapter, I explore Nabl’s complicated relationship to National Socialism, showing that, although his involvements with the Nazis were ill-judged, Nabl was not committed to their politics and wrote only politically innocuous fiction during the regime.
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Oergel, Naike. "The return of King Arthur and the Niebelungen : the significance of national myth in nineteenth-century English and German literature." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359856.
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Baker, Ingrid Liv. "Love in Conflict:D.E. Stevenson, War-Time Romance Fiction, and The English Air." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/51753.
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D.E. Stevenson was a 20th century Scottish novelist writing romance fiction before, during, and after World War II. By analyzing her life and dissecting the genre's formulaic properties, I will show how The English Air is representative of the ways some women coped with the eras of conflict of the two World Wars. In a critical analysis of the novel itself, I will show how Stevenson's attention to Anglo-German relations propels it beyond a light-hearted example of the genre as a whole, pushing against the prescribed requirements of what romance fiction must be. Though Stevenson has never before been studied through an academic lens, her novels were popular and successful, which suggests that this kind of fiction met the needs of readers during the early to mid-20th century, while coping with the devastation and uncertainty of war.Master of Arts
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Hörmann, Raphael. "Authoring the revolution, 1819-1848/49 : radical German and English literature and the shift from political to social revolution." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1774/.
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This thesis addresses, from a comparative perspective, an important lacuna in the research devoted to German and English revolutionary literature in the period from 1819 up to the European revolutions of 1848/49. It illustrates that a major shift from a concept of political revolution to one of social revolution took place within these years which is reflected in radical literature between the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ (1819) and the failure of the bourgeois political revolution of 1848/49. Theoretically based on selected writings of the early Marx and Engels on ideology, consciousness and political and social revolution as well as on more recent Marxist theories of cultural studies, this study shows how the contemporary philosophical, socio-political, socio-economic and literary discourse on revolution must be regarded as closely interlinked. This interconnection is not limited to an ideological, but also extends to a rhetorical and even metaphorical level. However, although it foregrounds these shared textual elements, the purpose of this thesis is not to add yet another philological analysis of literary works, but rather to flesh out the shared ideological involvement of the fictional and non-fictional revolutionary discourse. Texts and authors include in the British context of 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley and British radical journalists such as Richard Carlile. In order to analyse the shift in revolutionary discourse in the years between the French bourgeois July Revolution of 1830 and the early 1840s, texts by the literary revolutionary writers Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Georg Büchner are contextualised with the pamphlets and writings by the most radically socio-revolutionary among the French early socialists, Louis Auguste Blanqui, by rebellious weavers, by the Parisian German early proletarian movement as well as Marx’s earliest socio-philosophical justification of a proletarian social revolution, the “Einleitung Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechts-Philosophie” (1844).
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Laurer, Janin. "The translation of song lyrics in popular music : German lyrics and their translation into English." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-79882.
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This study investigates the translation of song lyrics and presents an analysis of translation outcomes. While the majority of previous studies regarding song translation focuses on the translation of lyrics from musicals and operas, this study focuses on the translation of popular song lyrics. The lyrics of eight German songs and their English versions were analysed using the approximation approach (Franzon 2009) which divides smaller textual units into the categories paraphrase, metaphrase and addition. The target texts (henceforth TT) were also categorised according to Peter Low’s (2013) song translation categories, translation, adaptation and replacement text. The aim of this study is to determine to what degree the meaning of the source texts (henceforth ST) is transferred into the TTs and to determine how Franzon’s approximation approach can be used to determine if the TTs are translations, adaptations, or replacement texts. This study found that all TTs were mostly made up of paraphrases and metaphrases, which means that all TT derived to most parts directly from the STs i.e. the TT was written using mostly direct and oblique translations. Due to the low frequency of additions and all significant details of the STs being transferred into the TTs, all song translations analysed in this study were categorised as translations.
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Storm, Marjolijn. "Agatha Christie's 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles' : a case study in Dutch and German translation cultures using corpus linguistic tools." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3782/.
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Rooted in the field of Descriptive Translation Studies, the thesis combines such different areas as corpus linguistics, literary, cultural, media and socio-historical studies of the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. Five translations (three German and two Dutch) of Agatha Christie's first detective novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles are analysed. Using the theories by Itamar Even-Zohar (Polysystem Theory) and Gideon Toury (Translation Norms), the different approaches translators have taken to the text are examined and their translation decisions explained by looking at the status and position translations from English, detective stories as such, and the writer Agatha Christie had in the country and at the time these translations were published.
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Volckmer, Katharina Barbara Emmy. "Society and its outsiders in the novels of Jakob Wassermann." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:84e42410-5b61-4299-a2c3-f69d89b4921e.
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This thesis looks at a number of Jakob Wassermann’s novels and the ways in which society is depicted in them. Seen as a whole, Wassermann’s oeuvre can therefore be understood as an attempt to portray (mostly) German society at different historical stages. The periods in question are Biedermeier Germany, the Wilhelmine era, the years of the Great War and finally the Weimar Republic, the depiction of all of which reveal Wassermann as a fierce critic of his time. In addition to this interest in society, this thesis will examine Wassermann’s concern with various outsider figures which complement his portrayals of society. The outsider figures Wassermann seems to be mostly interested in are the Jew, the woman, the child and the homosexual man. However, Wassermann is not just interested in these outsiders on their own but also draws extensive parallels between the various forms of exclusion they experience in a society dominated by the Gentile man or, as in the case of the child, by the adult. These parallels have proven to be revelatory and have led to new insights into Wassermann’s works. The dynamic of the outsider vs. society is, however, in many ways no longer applicable to those novels written during and after the Great War. Instead Wassermann now combines his interest in the figure of the outsider with an interest in the depiction of character. At the same time character becomes a mirror not only for the society Wassermann portrays in his writing but also for the society he lived in. This makes for an altogether more complex but also more intriguing structure of his later writing. This thesis will examine how all these different elements when combined offer new ways of looking at Wassermann’s writing.
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Pál, Andrea. "The role of cross-linguistic formal similarity in Hungarian-German bilingual learners of English as a foreign language." Phd thesis, Universität Potsdam, 2001. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2005/145/.
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Gegenstand der Dissertation ist die Untersuchung interlingualer lexikalischer Prozesse von Worterkennung und-zugriff bei ungarndeutschen Bilingualen, die Englisch als Fremdsprache erlernen, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rolle von Kognaten. Ziel der Studie ist es, die Prozesse lexikalischer Aktivierung in einem polyglotten System zu beschreiben und sowohl die mentalen Lexika, als auch die Verknüpfung und gegenseitige Aktivierung (z. B. durch 'direct word association' oder durch 'concept mediation') zu modellieren. Drei abhängige Variablen werden in einer quantitativen und qualitativen Analyse empirischer Daten untersucht: Genauigkeit, Antwortzeitlatenzen und phonologische Interferenz. Die Resultate der Experimente werden im Rahmen eines multilingualen Netzwerkmodells interpretiert.The dissertation examines aspects of the interlingual lexical processes of word recognition and word retrieval in Hungarian-German bilinguals learning English as a foreign language, with particular respect to the role of cognates. The purpose of the study is to describe the process of lexical activaton in a polyglot system and to model the mental lexicons and the ways entries in the lexicons are connected and activated (e.g. activation through direct word association or through concept mediation). Three dependent variables are studied in quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data taken from experiments: rate of accurate responses, response latencies and phonological interference. The results of the experiments are interpreted in the framework of a multiple language network model.
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Chaker, Dana. "Speaking the unspeakable : a comparative approach to representations of child sexual abuse in English- and German-speaking literature of the twentieth century." Thesis, University of Kent, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.499841.
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Lathey, Gillian. "The impossible legacy : identity and purpose in recent (1970-95) English and German language autobiographical children's literature set in the Third Reich and the Second World War." Thesis, University of Surrey, 1997. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/843951/.
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It is the aim of this study to explore the phenomenon of recent (1970-1995) English and German language autobiographical writing for children in which writers' childhood experiences during the Third Reich, the war years and the immediate post-war period provide the basis for a fictionalised reconstruction of childhood. The complex relationship between childhood and adulthood evident in these texts is one forged by the particular social and historical circumstances of wartime, as many writers affected by the last world war are engaged in a process of reassessing their own identities in accordance with changing perspectives on the past. Current ideologies inevitably shape the adult narrator's reconstruction of the historical events which a child could not understand fully at the time. In these texts, recording experience for the next generation serves a therapeutic as well as a didactic purpose, for each enables the writer to regain contact with the childhood self in a contained and clearly focussed narrative. A detailed thematic and stylistic analysis of selected texts is informed by a survey of studies on the history and purpose of autobiographical writing about childhood, an examination of the of role of writing as therapy in the psychoanalytical tradition, and the position of language in the autobiographical process. In particular, the work of Jung and the reinterpretation of Freud by Jacques Lacan has illuminated discussion of these issues. Comparisons are made between retrospective accounts of wartime childhood by German, Jewish and British writers; differences in the nature and volume of autobiographical writing in German and English are related to the timing of these accounts and the decision to write for a child audience. In passing stories on to the next generation, writers' selection of content and control of narrative perspective are indicative of both national and personal preoccupations. Finally, the interplay between a historically evolving reevaluation of the past and the developmental history of the self is related to aspects of the reception of texts and the purposes they are expected to fulfil.
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Schroeder, Elfrieda Neufeld. "Fragmented identity, a comparative study of German Jewish and Canadian Mennonite literature after World War II." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ60565.pdf.
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McMurtry, Aine. "Crisis and form in Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose : an aesthetic examination of the poetic drafts of the 1960s." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bdad508f-d96c-4480-8fa3-87f1b648e41d.
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This thesis demonstrates the aesthetic impact of crisis on Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose. It examines poetic drafts written during a period of personal breakdown in the 1960s, which have largely been received as documents of personal suffering, and identifies these texts as a radical stage of writing that was to prove formally significant for Bachmann's development of the prose "Todesarten"-Projekt. This thesis draws on the new material made available with the publication of these poetic drafts to chart the genesis of Bachmann's acclaimed late oeuvre. By selecting and grouping lyric fragments, the thesis defines recurrent features in this verse and accounts for the texts as a body of writing that forms a radical, yet undocumented, part of this oeuvre. In terms of both their form and of their content, the fragmentary drafts are shown to reflect new engagement with aspects of experience conventionally excluded from High Art. In light of Bachmann's growing preoccupation with the need for aesthetic engagement in the post-war era, close readings reveal how she set about taking her subjective suffering as a basis for a critique of the social order. The thesis outlines how, during the 1960s, Bachmann pioneered a symptomatic expressive mode that - in the disrupted form of the writing - found an indirect means of manifesting the wider origins of subjective disturbance. The ambiguous aesthetic status of these poetic drafts, which were never finished by Bachmann, is related to an inability to establish structural distance from crisis in lyric form. Building on its readings of the poetic drafts, the thesis traces Bachmann's prose experimentation with the same motifs. It identifies how, ultimately, the prose medium enabled the author to resolve problems of aesthetic form raised in the verse. Parallels with the work of other writers and thinkers illuminate the development of a reflexive mode where sophisticated aesthetic strategies enable the oblique expression of cultural critique.
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Madary, Sheila. "Home Abroad." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2011. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1380.
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Comprised of four essays, this collection of creative nonfiction focuses on facets of daily life and culture in Germany. The author recounts her experiences as she and her family assimilate into a foreign culture and adapt to using its language. The first essay tells of the family’s unexpected but rewarding sojourn in Germany after losing everything to Hurricane Katrina. The subsequent essays display a broader range of experiences and cultural observations upon the family’s return to Germany four years later. These include a narrative of the family’s move to a small town in central Germany, an interview with a local asparagus farmer and an account of the author’s children’s efforts to learn German.
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Brook, Madeleine E. "Popular history and fiction : the myth of August the Strong in German literature, art, and media." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cb7df46e-ab52-4f27-a084-41d7fab5b54e.
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This thesis concerns the function of fiction in the creation of an historical myth and the uses that that myth is put to in a number of periods and differing régimes. Its case study is the popular myth of August the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, as a man of extraordinary sexual prowess and the ruler over a magnificent, but frivolous, court in Dresden. It examines the origins of this myth in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and its development up to the twenty-first century in German history writing, fiction, art, and media. The image August created for himself in the art, literature, and festivities of his court as an ideal ruler of extremely broad cultural and intellectual interests and high political ambitions and abilities linked him closely with eighteenth-century notions of galanterie. This narrowed the scope of his image later, especially as nineteenth-century historians selected fictional sources and interpreted them as historical sources to present August as an immoral political failure. Although nineteenth-century popular writers exhibited a more varied response to August’s historical role, the negative historiography continued to resonate in later history writing. Ironically, the myth of August the Strong represented an opportunity in the GDR in creating and fostering a sense of identity, first as a socialist state with historical and cultural links to the east, and then by examining Prusso-Saxon history as a uniquely (East) German issue. Finally, the thesis examines the practice of historical re-enactment as it is currently employed in a number of variations on German TV and in literature, and its impact on historical knowledge. The thesis concludes that, while narrative forms are necessary to history and fiction, and fiction is a necessary part of presenting history, inconsistent combinations of the two can undermine the projects of both.
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McMackin, Daniel Edwin. "AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF ULRICH VON TÜRHEIM'S CONTINUATION OF GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG'S TRISTAN." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1305567200.
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Miskin, Kristana. "A Transnational Study: Young Adult Literature Exchanged Between the US and Germany." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2008. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1612.
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Both young adult literature and transnational literature occupy transitional spaces and defy simple classifications. Their commonalities naturally suit the two sets of literature for concurrent study. However, the field is underdeveloped, particularly in the United States. With a concentration on the exchanges taking place between the U.S. and Germany, this thesis addresses the need to assemble primary materials and pertinent critical commentary into a single place available to educators, scholars, and researchers to acquire background on transnational YAL themes. The thesis delineates methods used in conducting and compiling research on U.S.-German YAL exchange and highlights the translation and publication concerns associated with this process. It examines how prizes for translations are granted in each nation, identifying organizations that facilitate the process of exchange and describing transnational trends rising out of these circumstances. The concluding chapter visits concerns and complications raised during the investigation, posing questions for further study of the U.S.-German young adult literature relationship and advocating the pursuit of similar research in other world regions. The appendices provide sites for continued examination. They include lists of award-winning translations available in the U.S., novels by American authors that have been translated and published in Germany, and novels by German-language authors that have been translated and published in the U.S.
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Elder, Lara Frances. "Heinrich Heine in Paris : the poetics and politics of self-fashioning." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a41acb1e-84bd-4687-abc8-331bdacd30e5.
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Drawing on the concept developed in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, this thesis presents Heinrich Heine as an extreme case of the ‘self-fashioning’ writer. I argue that his preoccupation with self-construction determines what and how he writes, how he treats his reading public and, crucially, how he perceives and evaluates his own career. Though self-fashioning occurs in his earliest works, Heine’s decision to move to Paris (1831) was the single biggest self-determining act of his life; he constructs it as a moment of rebirth. Inspired by the July Revolution, he sought a new authorial identity in harmony with the supposed new world order and his own social, political and artistic ideals. However, the reality of juste-milieu society—a continual seesawing between modernisation and restoration—cast doubt on the possibility, even the desirability, of novelty and progress, the goals of revolution. In this context, Heine cultivates the identity of a perpetually embattled writer through confrontational dialogue with contemporary ideologies and his readership alike; ever ambivalent in his attitude to the role of art in a modernising world, he is also engaged in an internal battle with the self. First I show how he establishes himself in the role of cultural correspondent in the early journalism by developing a mode of self-conscious spectatorship which enables him to negotiate between contemporary French conditions and German readership expectations. Second I investigate the strategies he uses to free himself from his Buch der Lieder legacy and redefine his identity as a poet in Paris; I show how the Neue Gedichte (1844) are assembled to record and reflect on this transitional process, making the collection a monument to his self-fashioning tendencies. Finally I explore how Heine manipulates the relationship between public and private within a concept of self to construct his authorial identity; I consider a number of self-editing and self-reconstructive practices in prefaces, letters and autobiographical writing.
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Arnold, Hannah. ""A minor Atlantic Goethe" : W.H. Auden's Germanic bias." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:061fdedc-d1f0-4cb0-a4a1-59b4b27d7ef3.
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This thesis is an account of the poet and critic W.H. Auden's relations with Germany and Germans over the course of his life (1907-1973), presented through a selection of influences that have received little critical attention in the corpus of secondary literature to date. While these connections and influences are manifold and sometimes disparate, they can serve as a prism to tell Auden's life-story from a particular, relatively unexplored angle and to illuminate his work. The thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One discusses Auden’s engagement with German literature before 1928, his reasons for spending nine months in Weimar Berlin 1928-29, and the formative influence of this experience on his life and work. Chapter Two explores Auden's relationship with his 'in-laws', the famous family of Nobel Prize winning author Thomas Mann, and Auden's choice of an international life-style. Chapter Three discusses various other, later German influences on Auden: his visit to Germany with the US Army and its traces in The Age of Anxiety; issues concerning the German translation of this text; his Ford Foundation residence in isolated West Berlin; and his intellectual friendship with Hannah Arendt. Introduction and Conclusion embed these three specific chapters, deliberating the topic more abstractly. A number of appendices bring together a wide range of unpublished sources – and their translations into English, if the original is composed in German. Translations of all German appendix material can be found in the appendix itself.
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McBride, Barbara L. "Joseph Knecht's pattern of awakening in Hermann Hesse's The glass bead game." Scholarly Commons, 1995. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/2284.
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The purpose of this thesis is to establish the pattern of Joseph Knecht's awakening in Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Based on the premise that Knecht, unlike Hesse's previous protagonists, is an integrated individual living within a disintegrated and segregated environment, a secondary intent of this paper is to examine the paradox of Knecht's Castalian existence. Each chapter concentrates on a stage of Knecht's development, both formally as a Castalian, and psychologically as an individual who is committed to serving the highest authority. This authority is not the rigid, one-dimensional Castalia but rather the dynamic force which governs all life. Knecht compares himself to music and perceives his life as a process of becoming. As he ascends the ladder of Castalian hierarchy, Knecht's own consciousness develops through the intervention of several antithetical figures who challenge him to reconcile the subjective nature of Truth and the transience of all forms. When he can no longer justify serving an Order which is governed by the pretense of perfection and permanence, Knecht feels obligated to warn Castalia of its own temporality and to resign his position as Magister Ludi. Knecht's leap beyond Castalia and into the deadly lake at Belpunt serves two purposes; not only does he take the first step toward integrating Castalia and the outside world, but he fulfills his own life by sacrificing himself to his pupil Tito.
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Brocious, Elizabeth Olsen. "Transcendental Exchange: Alchemical Discourse in Romantic Philosophy and Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2008. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2301.pdf.
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Waller, C. D. "The poetry of Anton Schnack." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:354fe0a5-68d5-4a9e-b051-b5f77ab74acc.
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This thesis is the first academic treatment of the poetry of Anton Schnack (1892-1973): his work is not well known, even in Germany. Methodologically the thesis takes a combined literary, historical and biographical approach, exploring the complex and sometimes deceptive relations between his poetry and the turbulence of his time. The primary aim of the thesis is to show that Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier (1920) is a uniquely innovative volume of war poetry which, to be fully appreciated, needs to be assessed against the background of previous German war poetry and the development of the sonnet cycle. It is placed in the context of Schnack’s other lyrical work, particularly of the three volumes of Expressionist poetry which immediately preceded it and which themselves are analysed as examples of a very powerful kind of Expressionism. Schnack did not publish his next volume of verse until 1936, and three further collections emerged in quick succession between 1947 and 1953. These four collections are examined in detail in the context of Schnack’s decision to stay in southern Germany and to maintain a consistently low profile. The thesis begins with a general introduction to Schnack’s life and work and makes specific reference to his contemporary and current standing among literary historians and critics. Chapter Two focuses on the three volumes of Expressionist verse and documents the cultural circles which he frequented in Munich and the numerous Expressionist magazines and periodicals to which he contributed. The next three chapters are dedicated to Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier and examine it with reference to its poetic form as a cycle of sonnets and of its merits and status as war poetry. The final chapter pays particular attention to Schnack’s life in the Third Reich, situating the single collection he published during that era among the literary works of Inner Emigration, before analysing his three post-war collections.
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Simon, Stephen Andrew. "Austro-American Reflections: Making the Writings of Ann Tizia Leitich Accessible to English-Speaking Audiences." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2012. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3543.
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Ann Tizia Leitich wrote about America to a Viennese audience as a foreign correspondent with the unique and personal perspective of an immigrant to the United States. Leitich differentiates herself from other Europeans who reported on America in her day by telling of the life of the average working American. In so doing, Leitich uses her work as a foreign correspondent to create a new identity for Austria between the World Wars. Leitich uses America in the 1920's and 1930's as a cultural mirror in which the new Republic of Austria can see itself. Leitich's perspective of America is not only useful to the German-speaking audiences of her time, but also sheds light on America in the interwar period to readers of all backgrounds. Unfortunately, the influence of Leitich's journalism is currently limited to German-speaking audiences. Included are 31 translations of Leitich's articles for the benefit of English-speaking audiences to assist in further analysis of implications of her work.
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Juillard-Maniece, Jennifer. "From German to Yiddish : adaptation strategies in the Kuhbukh and the Siben weisen mainster bichel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:91f979ad-4dbf-4250-a7ba-02008caa2ef1.
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In light of often derogatory and unqualified assessments of Yiddish literature adapted from German narrative models, this thesis will propose a different approach to viewing these adaptations. Building on methodologies and frameworks of analyses developed in contemporary medieval scholarship, this thesis pushes for a re-assessment of this literature and suggests a flexible model of adaptation that views adaptation as a creative interaction between two texts. In response to unsatisfactory approaches to judaizing strategies found in Yiddish texts adapted from German literature, this thesis also suggests a different approach. Judaizing processes can either be part of overall processes of adaptation aimed at coding the text as Jewish within an overarching framework of renewed cultural specificity; or, they can function as translation principles by achieving equivalence with the original model. To illustrate both ends of this scale of adaptation, this thesis centres on two early modern Yiddish texts: the Kuhbukh (Verona, 1595) and the Siben weisen mainster bichel (Basel, 1602). The four chapters at the core of this thesis develop and apply extensive frameworks of literary analyses which enable us to rigorously assess the differing levels of adaptations (translation and Wiedererzählen) of both texts. This thesis pushes for a future reassessment of other popular Yiddish narratives adapted from German models. This could ideally be achieved by a positioning of each individual Yiddish text based on German narratives on the proposed scale of adaptation. This should be backed by verifiable methodologies and analyses devoid of unjustifiably dismissive opinions. This would consequently move scholarship towards structured, methodological analyses of early Yiddish secular literature.
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Troscianko, Emily Tamarisk. "The literary science of the 'Kafkaesque'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:47188ae7-a32b-41e8-b591-303b7d9367de.
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This study provides a precise definition of the term 'Kafkaesque' by enriching literary criticism with scientific theory and practice, including an experiment on readers' responses to Kafka. Dictionary definitions justify taking the term back to its textual origins in Kafka's works, and the works can fruitfully be analysed by investigating how readers engage with them through cognitive processes of imagination. Modern scientific developments posit that vision, imagination, and consciousness should be conceived of not in terms of static pictorialism – reducible to the notion of 'pictures in the head' – but in terms of enaction, i.e. as an ongoing interaction with the external world around us. Most traditional nineteenth-century Realist texts are based on pictorialist assumptions, while Kafka's texts evoke perception non-pictorially and are therefore more cognitively realistic. In his personal writings, Kafka wrestles with problems entailed by pictorialist conceptions of vision, imagination, and the function of language, and comes to enactivist solutions: evocation of perception that does not result in painting static tableaux with words. In his fictional works, Kafka correspondingly evolves a cognitively realistic way of writing to evoke fictional worlds that directly engage the cognitive processes of their readers; Der Proceß is a prime example of the 'Kafkaesque' text and reading experience, defined by being compelling yet simultaneously unsettling. Modulations in narrative perspective and evocation of emotion as enactive also contribute to the experience of the 'Kafkaesque' as compelling; yet Kafka's texts simultaneously unsettle by preventing straightforward emotional identification with the protagonists, and destabilising deep-rooted concepts of selfhood as singular and unified. The theoretical discussion of the 'Kafkaesque' experience as compelling yet unsettling is complemented and refined by an experiment testing readers' responses to a short story by Kafka. The term 'Kafkaesque realism' denotes Kafka's compelling yet unsettling non-pictorial evocation of perception of the fictional world. Kafkaesque realism falls into the broader category of 'cognitive realism', which provides a framework for analysing fictional texts more generally.
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Lingscheid, Claudia. "Das 'Buch von den Neun Felsen' : Textgeschichte und Überlieferung mit einer kritischen Edition." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7194d405-a68a-47c1-89f6-145f826921ad.
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Subject to this study is the Neunfelsenbuch ('Book of the Nine Cliffs'), an account of a vision, which is assumed to have originated in Strasbourg after 1352. Initially written in the German vernacular, it was widely circulated in various German dialects and in Dutch and Latin translation. The text exists in two versions: a long version, which is thought to be the work of Rulman Merswin (1382), a citizen of Strasbourg and founder of the convent at the 'Gruner Worth' (1367); and a short version of unknown authorship. Previous scholars have considered the long version to be Merswin's reformulation of the shorter text, which was presumed - though not proven - to have been the original. By investigating the transmission and the textual history, this study aims to solve the questions of authorship and original form. It provides an overview of the entire transmission of both versions in prints and manuscripts, particularly focusing on the southern German short version. For the first time the short version is made available in a critical edition, as a basis for a systematic comparison with the long version. The comparison reveals that, in fact, the long version is the original and thus confirms Rulman Merswin as the true author. Written in 1352, the text not only belongs to the oldest works of the Tauler reception, but also stands at the beginning of the literary production at the 'Gruner Worth'. As a result, this text provides new insights into the spiritual development and the literary heritage of one of the most important centres of spiritual literature in the German vernacular of its time.
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Julin, Hanna. "“What you NEED to know”, “Was man wissen muss” and “Vad man behöver veta” : A contrastive corpus study of NEED to and its German and Swedish correspondences in non-fiction." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-91202.
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This study investigates how the semi-modal need to is translated into German/Swedish and which German/Swedish correspondences are translated into need to. To this end, the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS) is used. Nida’s (1964: 159-162) concept of formal and dynamic equivalence is used to perform the qualitative analysis and to discuss the results from the quantitative part of the study. The use of semi-modals such as be going to, have to and want to have increased during the second half of the 20th century (Leech et al.: 2009: 99). need to represents the obligation as being in the best interest of the subject and is associated with objectivity (Kastrone 2008: 829; Aijmer 2017: 28) Thus, need to is used to distance the speaker to avoid an authoritarian stance. This trend is a sign of an ongoing democratization (Leech et al. 2009: 270). The results showed that the preferred German translation is müssen (‘must’) (55%) and the preferred Swedish translation is behöva (‘need’) (47%). ‘Other’ is the second preferred German translation and the third preferred Swedish translation. These results are reflected in the structures translated from German and Swedish. The results indicate that the semantic category of the co-occurring main verb and the co-occurring subject affect translation. Based on these results, it could be said that English, followed by Swedish, is leading the process of democratization. However, further studies are needed to confirm this hypothesis.
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Wallace, Willie. "Govoreeting with Lewdies: A Critical Discourse Analysis of A Clockwork Orange and its Translations Across Media and Language." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2020. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3748.
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Much linguistic research has been done on the fictional argot of A Clockwork Orange, known as Nadsat, but few efforts have been made to expand beyond the classification and analysis of Nadsat. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper looks at the overarching discourse of A Clockwork Orange and aims to answer three questions: What exigencies and discourses inform the creation of these works? What techniques and power structures are employed in the construction of these works? How do these works shape or attempt to shape the discourse? To answer these questions, I look at three instances of the discourse: Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and Krege’s translation, Clockwork Orange. These instances are varied over time of publication (1962, 1971, 1997), language (English, German), medium (novel, film), and culture (British, American, German), allowing enough variance to examine how the discourse changes to meet the needs of its participants.
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McLennan, Alistair. "Monstrosity in Old English and Old Icelandic literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2287/.
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Thesis Abstract. The purpose of this thesis is to examine Old English and Old Icelandic literary examples of monstrosity from a modern theoretical perspective. I examine the processes of monstrous change by which humans can become identified as monsters, focusing on the role played by social and religious pressures. In the first chapter, I outline the aspects of monster theory and medieval thought relevant to the role of society in shaping identity, and the ways in which anti-societal behaviour is identified with monsters and with monstrous change. Chapter two deals more specifically with Old English and Old Icelandic social and religious beliefs as they relate to human and monstrous identity. I also consider the application of generic monster terms in Old English and Old Icelandic. Chapters three to six offer readings of humans and monsters in Old English and Old Icelandic literary texts in cases where a transformation from human to monster occurs or is blocked. Chapter three focuses on Grendel and Heremod in Beowulf and the ways in which extreme forms of anti-societal behaviour are associated with monsters. In chapter four I discuss the influence of religious beliefs and secular behaviour in the context of the transformation of humans into the undead in the Íslendingasögur. In chapter five I consider outlaws and the extent to which criminality can result in monstrous change. I demonstrate that only in the most extreme instances is any question of an outlaw’s humanity raised. Even then, the degree of sympathy or admiration evoked by such legendary outlaws as Grettir, Gísli and Hörðr means that though they are ambiguous in life, they may be redeemed in death. The final chapter explores the threats to human identity represented by the wilderness, with specific references to Guthlac A, Andreas and Bárðar saga and the impact of Christianity on the identity of humans and monsters. I demonstrate that analysis of the social and religious issues in Old English and Old Icelandic literary sources permits nuanced readings of monsters and monstrosity which in turn enriches understanding of the texts in their entirety.
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Boyle, Mary. "To be a pilgrim : a comparative study of late medieval accounts of pilgrimage from Germany and England to the Holy Land." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8f1b780c-642e-4ab1-9878-7068f9634ffa.
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As a large-scale international cultural phenomenon, the Jerusalem pilgrimage must be approached comparatively. This project compares the pilgrimage accounts of two Germans and two Englishmen who travelled to Jerusalem in the second half of the long fifteenth century. The texts are those of William Wey, (written c.1470), Bernhard von Breydenbach (printed 1486), Arnold von Harff (written 1499) and the 'Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde', composed by his anonymous chaplain (printed 1511). Each chapter focuses on a pilgrim, and one of four thematic topics: genre, the religious other, curiosity and print. This project treats these works as literary texts which can be approached from the perspective of cultural history, rather than as historical sources. The project, therefore, is more a consideration of how the pilgrimage is represented than it is about the events of each pilgrimage, and so it looks at the pilgrimages created in writing. Pilgrimage writings tend to focus on Jerusalem's spiritual significance, rather than its worldly position. In this sense, textual representations of travel to Jerusalem represent something of a disconnect with travel to other physical destinations, and the conceptual space of pilgrimage will be of key significance to this thesis. This has implications for practice as well as writing, and therefore the thesis will address how the writers consider their journeys, as well as the idea of virtual pilgrimage. The thesis engages with questions of identity, and how it is presented, as well as the authors' relationship with their audiences. This necessitates analysing collective identity, as well as the different audiences for printed and manuscript texts. The most important research question, bringing together these issues, considers whether the authors' different geographical origins affect their self-presentation and understanding of pilgrimage. This leads to my central contention: that pilgrimage must be portrayed as a single, unified experience.
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Hancock, Jessica Clare. "Beyond sorrow and swords : gender in the Old Norse Volsung legend and its British rewritings." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ee7cc4e6-e835-458f-9aca-90073ef471b1.
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This thesis explores male and female identity in Old Norse and British iterations of the Völsung legend, focusing on the Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga, William Morris's The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, and Melvin Burgess’s Bloodtide and Bloodsong. Using poststructuralist theories of gender and posthumanism to analyse representations of gender in these texts, it argues that, in the Old Norse versions of this legend, female identity is closely connected to the control of representations of narrative events, whereas male identity is subject to this control but becomes more overtly fluid in the depiction of shape-shifting. The thesis goes beyond previous critical analyses of gender in these texts which observe an active/ passive binary, or focus on female monstrosity and lament, and male heroism. Unlike most examinations of adaptations of this legend which focus on the medieval or Victorian material, this thesis provides a detailed exploration of The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs in conjunction with its Old Norse sources. In doing so, it establishes the silencing of female characters by Morris's rewriting, and the foregrounding of male identity through a focus on the body, performance and the built environment. This thesis also considers both the Old Norse texts and Morris's poem alongside later, critically neglected, British versions of the legend to explore the ways in which narrative form influences the representation of the multiplicity of gender in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, and the importance of a posthuman conception of identity in Bloodtide and Bloodsong. The thesis argues that the Old Norse sources do not stand aside from their later interpretations as something complete and originary, but are themselves supplemented by the rewritings of Morris, Tolkien and Burgess; it is, therefore, necessary to foreground our knowledge of all these iterations of the narrative to offer a fuller understanding of gender in the Old Norse Völsung legend and its British rewritings.
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Birkett, Thomas Eric. "Ráð Rétt Rúnar : reading the runes in Old English and Old Norse poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e7ea1359-fedc-43a5-848b-7842a943ce96.
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Responding to the common plea in medieval inscriptions to ráð rétt rúnar, to ‘interpret the runes correctly’, this thesis provides a series of contextual readings of the runic topos in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry. The first chapter looks at the use of runes in the Old English riddles, examining the connections between material riddles and certain strategies used in the Exeter Book, and suggesting that runes were associated with a self-referential and engaged form of reading. Chapter 2 seeks a rationale for the use of runic abbreviations in Old English manuscripts, and proposes a poetic association with unlocking and revealing, as represented in Bede’s story of Imma. Chapter 3 considers the use of runes for their ornamental value, using 'Solomon and Saturn I' and the rune poems as examples of texts which foreground the visual and material dimension of writing, whilst Chapter 4 compares the depiction of runes in the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda with epigraphical evidence from the Migration Age, seeking to dispel the idea that they reflect historical practice. The final chapter looks at the construction of a mythology of writing in the Edda, exploring the ways in which myth reflects the social impacts of literacy. Taken together these approaches highlight the importance of reading the runes in poetry as literary constructs, the script often functioning as a form of metawriting, used to explore the parameters of literacy, and to draw attention to the process of writing itself.
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Downing, Lisa. "The early and influential role of science fantasy in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century England, France, and Germany| A selected account." Thesis, Northern Illinois University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1546015.
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Science fiction critics have dueled over definitions of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century science fiction, often classifying early science fiction as mere prototype. Chapter One of this thesis examines the myriad definitions of the term “science fiction” allowing a distinguishable set of literary characteristics for science fiction, fantasy, and science fantasy. Early science fiction authors such as Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac, Margaret Cavendish, and Jonathan Swift refashioned the familiar fantasy genre with scientific ideas, establishing a science fantasy genre to frame dangerous and rebellious ideas in a conventional and innocuous structure, the fiction novel. Chapter Two analyzes the science fiction elements present in early science fantasy of Kepler, Godwin, De Bergerac, Cavendish, and Swift as well as the scientific, religious, and political ramifications of science fantasy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Chapter Three briefly highlights elements of early science fantasy that influenced twentieth- and twenty-first century science fiction. Early science fantasy not only influenced generations of science fiction writers and scientists, but it also was one of the main forces that legitimized the sciences.
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Parker, Eleanor Catherine. "Anglo-Scandinavian literature and the post-conquest period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:18aa9912-85f6-4cba-b4d6-4f8f7453402f.
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This thesis concerns narratives about Anglo-Scandinavian contact and literary traditions of Scandinavian origin which circulated in England in the post-conquest period. The argument of the thesis is that in the eleventh century, particularly during the reign of Cnut and his sons, literature was produced for a mixed Anglo-Danish audience which drew on shared cultural traditions, and that some elements of this largely oral literature can be traced in later English sources. It is further argued that in certain parts of England, especially the East Midlands, an interest in Anglo-Scandinavian history continued for several centuries after the Viking Age and was manifested in the circulation of literary narratives dealing with Anglo-Scandinavian interaction, invasion and settlement. The first chapter discusses some narratives about the reign of Cnut in later sources, including the Encomium Emmae Reginae, hagiographical texts by Goscelin and Osbern of Canterbury, and the Liber Eliensis; it is argued that they share certain thematic concerns with the literature known to have been produced at Cnut’s court. The second chapter explores the literary reputation of the Danish Earl of Northumbria, Siward, and his son Waltheof in twelfth-century sources from the East Midlands and in thirteenth-century Norwegian and Icelandic histories. The third chapter deals with an episode in the Middle English romance Guy of Warwick in which the hero helps to defeat a Danish invasion of England, and examines the romance’s references to a historical Danish right to rule in England. The final chapter discusses the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane, and argues that the poet of Havelok, aware of the role of Danish settlement in the history of Lincolnshire, makes self-conscious use of stereotypes and literary tropes associated with Danes in order to offer an imaginative reconstruction of the history of Danish settlement in the area.
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Pfeffer, Sarah [Verfasser]. "“Palms require translation”: Derek Walcott’s Poetry in German : Three Case Studies / Sarah Pfeffer." Kassel : Kassel University Press, 2016. http://d-nb.info/1108324371/34.
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Rasmus-Vorrath, Jack Kendrick. "The honesty of thinking : reflections on critical thinking in Nietzsche's middle period and the later Heidegger." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:effe66e1-235d-46a9-a570-b42dceb7e92f.
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This dissertation engages with contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the issue of self-knowing with respect to the notions of honesty and authenticity. Accounting for the two philosophers' developing conceptions of these notions allows a response to interpreters who conceive the activity of self-knowing as a primarily personal problem. The alternative accounts proposed take as a point of departure transitional texts that reveal both thinkers to be engaged in processes of revision. The reading of honesty in Chapters 1 and 2 revolves around Nietzsche's groundwork on prejudice in Morgenröthe (1880-81), where he first problematizes the moral-historical forces entailed in actuating the 'will to truth'. The reading of authenticity in Chapters 3 and 4 revolves around Heidegger's lectures on what motivates one's thinking in Was heißt Denken? (1951-52). The lectures call into question his previous formal suppositions on what calls forth one's 'will-to-have-a-conscience', in an interpretation of Parmenides on the issue of thought's linguistic determination, discussed further in the context of Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950-59). Chapter 5 shows how Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche contributed to his ongoing revisions to the notion of authenticity, and to the attending conceptions of critique and its authority. Particular attention is given to the specific purposes to which distinct Nietzschean foils are put near the confrontation's beginning--in Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche's second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung (1938), and in the monograph entitled Besinnung (1939) which they prepare--and near its end, in the interpretation of Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-85) presented in the first half of Was heißt Denken? Chapter 6 recapitulates the developments traced from the vantage point of the retrospective texts Die Zollikoner Seminare (1959-72) and the fifth Book of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1887). Closing remarks are made in relation to recent empirical research on the socio-environmental structures involved in determining self-identity.
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Mackenzie, Colin Peter. "Vernacular psychologies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5290/.
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This thesis examines the vernacular psychology presented in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. It focuses on the concept 'hugr', generally rendered in English as ‘mind, soul, spirit’, and explores the conceptual relationships between emotion, cognition and the body. It argues that despite broad similarities, Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English vernacular psychology differ more than has previously been acknowledged. Furthermore, it shows that the psychology of Old Norse-Icelandic has less in common with its circumpolar neighbours than proposed by advocates of Old Norse-Icelandic shamanism. The thesis offers a fresh interpretation of Old Norse-Icelandic psychology which does not rely on cross-cultural evidence from other Germanic or circumpolar traditions. In particular, I demonstrate that emotion and cognition were not conceived of ‘hydraulically’ as was the case in Old English, and that 'hugr' was not thought to leave the body either in animal form or as a person’s breath. I show that Old Norse-Icelandic psychology differs from the Old English tradition, and argue that the Old English psychological model is a specific elaboration of the shared psychological inheritance of Germanic whose origins require further study. These differences between the two languages have implications for the study of psychological concepts in Proto-Germanic, as I argue that there are fewer semantic components which can be reliably reconstructed for the common ancestor of the North and West Germanic languages. As a whole, the thesis applies insights from cross-cultural linguistics and psychology in order to show how Old Norse-Icelandic psychological concepts differ not only from contemporary Germanic and circumpolar traditions but also from the Present Day English concepts used to describe them. The thesis comprises four chapters and conclusion. Chapter 1 introduces the field of study and presents the methodologies and sources used. It introduces the range of cross-cultural variety in psychological concepts, and places Old Norse-Icelandic 'hugr' and its Old English analogue 'mōd' in a typological perspective. Chapter 2 reviews previous approaches to early Germanic psychology and introduces the major strand of research that forms the background to this study: Lockett’s (2011) proposal that Old English vernacular psychology operated in terms of a ‘hydraulic model’, where the 'mōd' would literally boil and seethe within a person’s chest in response to strong emotions. Chapter 3 outlines the native Old Norse-Icelandic psychological model by examining indigenously produced vernacular texts. It looks first at the claims that 'hugr' could leave the body in animal form or as a person’s breath. It then describes the relationship between emotion, cognition and the body in Old Norse-Icelandic texts and contrasts this with the Old English system. Chapter 4 examines the foreign influences which could potentially account for the differences between the Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic systems. It looks first at the imported medical traditions which were known in medieval Scandinavia at the time Old Norse-Icelandic texts were being committed to writing. Next it considers the psychology of Christian tradition from the early Old Icelandic Homily Book to late-fourteenth-century devotional poetry. Finally, it examines the representation of emotion and the body in the translated Anglo-Norman and Old French texts produced at the court of Hákon Hákonarson and explores how this was transposed to native romances composed in Old Norse-Icelandic. The conclusion summarises the findings of the thesis and presents a proposal for the methodology of studying medieval psychological concepts with directions for further research.
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Gerald, Amy. "Spinning a tale, English translations and adaptations of La belle au bois dormant from the Enlightenment to the Magic Kingdom." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ58455.pdf.
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Tso, Wing-bo, and 曹穎寶. "Female sexuality in Grimm's fairy tales and their English translations." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2002. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B26736160.
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Randall, Martin C. "'Appointments to keep in the past' : history, memory and representation in British fiction of the 1990s : writing about the Holocaust." Thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2005. http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/883/.
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The thesis examines British fiction of the 1990s, focusing on the `novel of history'. It contributes to the analysis of recent and contemporary British fiction, joining work by John Brannigan, Steven Connor, Peter Childs, Dominic Head, Rod Mengham, Nick Rennison and Alan Sinfield. Whilst these critics have written about the centrality of the historical novel, the significance of the Holocaust and its use in fictional narrative remains relatively under-theorised. Issues surrounding memory and representation and their relation to history are central to an understanding of how British 1990s Holocaust novels dramatise the events of the `real'. In this regard, the thesis contributes to the theory that the 1990s British novel often `looked backwards' over the waning century. Fiction attempting to represent the Holocaust has made a significant contribution to this `taking stock'. A number of issues arise surrounding the complex relationship between historical `event' and `imaginary' text. Given the extremity of the Holocaust and the persistence of it as a 'secular-sacred' discourse, such issues are further problematised. The central theme is how British writers in the 1990s, given their temporal, spatial and familial distance from the event, have negotiated the `limits of representation' inherent in the aesthetic apprehension of the Holocaust. The fiction under discussion is by Martin Amis, Justin Cartwright, Robert Harris, John King, Caryl Phillips, Michele Roberts, W. G. Sebald, Rachel Seiffert, Zadie Smith and D. M. Thomas. The `apocalyptic turn' that many have characterised as emblematic of the 1990s is interpreted as a turning back to an `apocalypse' that has already taken place. Tropes of fragmented temporality, absence and presence, the sublime, articulation and silence, trauma, atrocity and the inherent problems of retelling the past are interpreted in relation to each individual text. Recent writing on the representation of the Holocaust also informs the central arguments of the thesis. Work by Saul Friedlander, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Berel Lang, Dominick LeCapra, Daniel R. Schwarz and Sue Vice discuss both the enduring legacy of the Holocaust and the areas of contention surrounding the `speaking' of the event. Holocaust representation will thus provide a `bridge' between analysis of the historical novel since 1989 and theoretical work on imagining the `Final Solution'. The thesis title is taken from Sebald's Austerlitz and alludes to the theme of contemporary writers making imaginary and ethical `journeys' back to the `dark heart' of the century. It also suggests something of the impulse to remember and `serve witness' to a generation of survivors. In conclusion, the thesis argues that despite the hegemony of postmodern concepts of the `textuality' of history and the instability of narrative, the Holocaust embodies a fundamental challenge to cultural and political relativism. The novels embrace and argue back against postmodern literary strategies, and in doing so reveal how ethical and aesthetic issues of representation are profoundly `tested' in context of the Holocaust.
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Allan, Shona Millar. ""Das Lebend'ge will ich preisen" : from Ästhetik to Humanität : a comparative study of Byron and Goethe with special reference to Don Juan and the West-östlicher Divan." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1999. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1185/.
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This comparative study of Byron and Goethe seeks to explore the idea that there may be a far more fundamental similarity between the mode of writing of these two poets than has been noted to date. Although there has been, and continues to be, much written about each poet individually there has been little produced on the two poets considered together since the first half of the 20th century - the biographical coincidences and the influence of Goethe's Faust on Byron's Manfred having been exhausted. The initial chapter of this thesis examines this debate before proceeding, in Chapters 2 and 3, to an examination, first of all Goethe's reception of Byron as revealed in his letters, journals, conversations and reviews and then, similarly, to Byron's reception of Goethe. Suspecting that the uniquely aesthetic, vital quality of Byron's and Goethe's poetry may well be the common factor in both, it is an exploration of this 'particularity' that provides the focus in Chapter 4. Having established that there is a fundamental link between Goethe and Byron in their views about art, aesthetics and the function of poetry, it is to close textual analysis of the West-östlicher Divan and Don Juan that I turn in Chapter 5. This close examination illuminates these connections better than any purely theoretical analysis could, and thus appropriately supports Goethe's and Byron's view that the only way to express the particular is precisely through the particular.