This thesis is an investigation into the medieval dialect of the pre-1974 county of Herefordshire. The main source materials consist of a group of literary texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, localised in the Herefordshire area by linguistic means. The study builds on the methodology developed in connection with the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986), but goes far beyond it both in its analysis of the individual texts and in using the data for descriptive and interpretative study. The aim is to contextualise and evaluate the evidence, as well as to gain a broad view of the characteristics of the dialect, including both diatopic and diachronic patterns and developments. In order to assess their value as evidence, a detailed dialect is carried out for each individual text; as part of this process, the Atlas localisations are reviewed, taking into consideration the full material now available, and various linguistic and textual questions are discussed. A set of dialect criteria for the localisation of texts within Herefordshire and the South-West Midland area is defined. While the study focuses on the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century materials, comparisons with earlier and later periods are made. Several thirteenth-century literary texts are discussed in detail, including the well-known 'AB-language' and the two manuscripts of The Owl and the Nightingale; the material is further related to the available evidence for the Old, Early Modern and Present-Day English periods. A series of studies of specific areas of grammar and phonology are carried out, covering topics such as the changes affecting the systems of gender, case and number since the Old English period, and the developments of the Early Middle English front rounded vowels, and of Germanic a. A language contact-based explanation of the Old English sound-change known as 'second fronting' is suggested. The linguistic patterns are related to the external history of the dialect, including geographical, political and settlement patterns, language contact with Welsh, and social/economic factors.

My thesis consists of an examination of various types of place-name formations, as evidence of the linguistic contact and interaction which occurred between incoming Scandinavian speakers and the native population of northern Britain, in light of current theories of language contact. The first chapter analyses the nature of the relationship between Scandinavian and Celtic speakers in areas of primary settlement in Scotland, and considers how this relationship is likely to have affected the language and, more specifically, the toponymy in regions of secondary settlement such as the North-West of England, the South-West of Scotland and the Isle of Man. The subsequent chapters examine four different types of place-name formation which are found chiefly in these secondary Scandinavian settlements: inversion-compound names, ǽrgi names, kirk- compound names and bý names. Each chapter looks at the nature and distribution of one of these groups, and investigates how language contact phenomena including bilingualism, lexical borrowing and substratum transfer may have influenced the form and development of such name-types. I have concluded that differing types of linguistic contact, occurring both in primary and secondary settlement areas, may account for the differing usage and distribution of the four categories of place-names. The inception of the inversion-compounds has been re-evaluated and it is argued that rather then having been coined by Scandinavians who were influenced by Celtic work-order, these names were instead created by Gaelic-speakers who had shifted to the Scandinavian language. It is also argued that the more widespread distribution of names in ǽrgi in comparison with the inversion names is not due to the two groups of names by coined by different groups of immigrants, nor because of the secondary dissemination of the element ǽrgi amongst non-Scandinavian speakers, as had previously been suggested. Rather, the disparity in distribution is likely to reflect the fact that the ǽrgi names result from the straightforward lexical transfer of a Gaelic element into the Scandinavian language, whereas the inversion names were created by a specific bilingual substrate element amongst the Scandinavian settlers. In the case of inversion-compounds with the initial kirk- it is argued that rather than representing partial translations of English cirice- or Gaelic cill- names, the names were coined as kirk- compounds within a Gaelic-Scandinavian context. The predominantly Scottish distribution of this toponymic group reflects secondary dissemination of the name-type amongst monolingual Gaelic-speakers in the South-West. In the case of names in bý, it is argued that this group do not represent a purely Danish wave of settlement throughout the Irish seaboard, as has previously been suggested. Rather, linguistic contact between Danes and Norwegians, and later English-speakers, led to the more widespread utilisation of this element.

The central part of this thesis (chapter 3) consists of a classification of 9071 lexical items comprising the semantic field Good and Evil. This classified semantic field, with minor alterations, will form part of the Historical Thesaurus of English currently being compiled in the English Language Department of Glasgow University. Some significant features of the Good and Evil classification system, devised and explained in this thesis, have also been adopted by the Historical Thesaurus. Chapter 1 places the thesis in a wider academic context. It explains briefly the Historical Thesaurus project, and describes how the classification of Good and Evil contributes to this. It also relates the thesis to linguistics, semantics, and especially to semantic theory, lexicography, and semantic classification. Chapter 2 defines the semantic field Good and Evil and discusses how the field was assembled. It provides details of those areas which were either rejected or extended in order to form the semantic field. It then describes in some detail the classification system devised for Good and Evil. The structure of the classification is explained, the use of the parts of speech as a valuable classificatory device is justified, and the contribution of other classificatory work is acknowledged. The chapter also discusses some particular problems and features of the Old English corpus. It ends with lists of stylistic and other conventions. Chapter 3 contains the Good and Evil classification, and chapter 4 consists of detailed notes on the classification. These notes discuss points relating to dating. Old English material, classificatory devices, closely connected categories, and some problems of dictionary definitions, among other things. Chapter 5 conducts a number of studies based on historical and etymological information drawn from the classification. The relative numbers of accessions and losses in different centuries in the categories are presented and discussed. The range of sources of origin of a limited number of categories arc detailed. The patterns of change, and the extent and rate of influence of different languages in different centuries, are then commented on and compared. Chapter 6 selects one area of vocabulary from Good and Evil - animal names used as names for people - and subjects this area to a detailed examination. The variety of animal names, and the range of people to whom they arc applied, arc discussed, and various statistics and comparisons arc drawn up. Also considered is the time gap between the first literal use of an animal name and the first figurative or metaphorical application of the same term to a person. In the process some interesting and, on occasion, unproven points about animal metaphor are brought to light. The thesis ends with three appendices. The first contains extra Good and Evil material not in the main classification, the second details 19th century obsolescences, and the third gives a numerical distribution of items in each category by part of speech

This thesis is an edition of the English texts in British Library MS Sloane 3285, an important fifteenth century medical collection, hitherto unpublished. After an introductory preface, the thesis consists of five chapters, followed by the text, notes and a glossary. Non English items are presented in appendices. Chapter 1 offers a description of the book’s make-up, and gives an account of its place within the Sloane collection. This chapter includes a paleographical discussion of various hands in the manuscript. Chapter 2 discusses the language of the different hands. Chapter 3 places the contents of texts in relation to medieval medical practice and theory. This chapter also offers an outline of the various traditions that lie behind these texts. Chapter 4 discusses the medieval provenance of the manuscript and relates it to its intellectual milieu. Chapter 5 outlines the editorial practice of the edition. An edition of the texts then follows, edited on conservative principles as outlined in chapter 5. The intention of this thesis is to reconstruct the mental landscape that informed the creation of this remarkable medieval artefact.

The present study is an exercise in applied linguistics and discourse analysis. It consists of two parts. While the first part is concerned with aspects of process in EFL academic writing settings, the second part is concerned with aspects of product. In investigating the aspects of process, a survey involving questionnaires and interviews was undertaken, the aim of which was to elicit EFL student and tutor perceptions of the process and acquisition of writing. 210 students studying English at two Jordanian universities: the University of Jordan and Yarmouk University, completed a questionnaire with 'closed' and 'open-ended' questions. In addition, 26 professors from the same universities completed another version of the same questionnaire. In investigating the aspects of product in the writing of EFL students, two mini-corpora of 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' texts, written by a volunteering sample of the students who responded to the questionnaire, were analysed. The aim of the analysis was to explore how EFL students choose formal aspects - syntactical and lexical - to make meanings in their texts. Halliday's systemic-functional grammar formed the basis for the different analytical frameworks (Lexical Density, Theme and Contextual Configuration and Text Structure) used in the analysis of the sample texts. The major findings of the present study are summarised as follows: with respect to the first part of the study, the results appear to be equivocal. Both student and tutor participants in the study confirmed that students in EFL academic writing settings are in need of both low-level and global tuition in English to enable them to write better. There was evidence from both parts of the study that both bottom-up: linguistic aspects such as words and grammar, and top-down: rhetorical aspects, such as the organisation and structure of text, content, and purpose are inseparable factors in the writing process.

This dissertation examines the ways in which cultural definitions of gender, sex, and race have equally impacted and disrupted women and their relationships in postcolonial culture. Such relationships can be with either with oneself or with others. My argument throughout this project is that colonialism as an act of systematic physical and psychological violence, together with its residual effects that split the individual and his/her community, is a primary cause of transgression. Breaking social boundaries takes place through a process of coding and decoding the body where female characters portrayed from a selected range of fiction demand agency in environments that deny them such power. In order to track the development or loss of feminine identity, I comparatively study the characters and incidents alongside one another to show how oppression, across time and space, can produce different expressions of revolt. Unlike colonized men who are also forced to question the integrity and wholeness of their body, with women the oppression is twofold: she is made inferior by nature of her race and her sex. Until today, this has serious implications that hinder the cultural development and economic progress of postcolonial cultures. Hence, the discussions presented in this project call for a feminist and postcolonial understanding of the corporeal body and challenges Cartesian ethics which conceptualize the mind as superior to the body. Arguably, they contribute to other dualities which participate in similar hierarchical ideals when discussing racial and sexual difference such as, self/other, masculine/feminine, civil/uncivilized. Crossing over different geographies, writers such as, Ahdaf Soueif and Toni Morrison showcase women who reject the dualisms, even if some of their struggles end tragically. Representing postcolonial women in this light invites a less biased understanding of the body as lived, and its reactions as consequent to where and how it goes about such living.

This thesis investigates—and seeks to address—the excision, marginalization and sequestering of female work within the elegiac tradition. Beginning with an analysis of key texts in elegy scholarship from the last thirty years, and the ways in which they participate in—and perpetuate—this marginalization, the thesis develops a transhistorical sketch of the elegiac tradition. This sketch examines the evolution of elegy as a genre, outlining Western cultural frameworks for understanding mourning, and historical perspectives which consider grief expression as a threat requiring constraint; as well as significant shifts in medical, theological and philosophical conceptions of melancholy—in order to delineate how and why women’s elegiac work has been marginalized within the traditional canon. This includes an in-depth critique and analysis of Freud’s 1917 paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ upon which much of current elegy scholarship depends, approaching both the gendered binary within Freud’s model, and the framework of economics which he uses to illustrate this model. This analysis is then extended through the post-Freudian work of Irigaray and Kristeva, as well as subsequent feminist thinkers, in order to question how we might begin to rectify the marginalization of female work without effacing the contexts within which it has been marginalized. These ideas are then extended and developed through the close reading of contemporary elegies by Susan Howe, Kristin Prevallet, Anne Carson, Maggie O’Sullivan and Claudia Rankine, investigating, among other things, erasure; resistance to closure; error and failure; disruption of reading practices; lyric instability and possibilities of shared grief. The length of the critical section of the thesis and extensive use of footnotes have both been agreed with my supervisory team on account of the scope of the project, and the examples required to demonstrate its argument. The critical section is followed by a collection of poetry made up of four interrelated sequences. These sequences seek to continue the arguments raised in the thesis, and reflect on the research demonstrated therein, specifically interrogating master narratives such as language, myth and history, in order to question notions of lament and pastoral; exploring the limits of the lyric and the possibility of speaking with, rather than speaking for an other; and the poential for harm within processes of textual recovery and memorialization.

This thesis focuses on predisciplinary dialogue in the Romantic periodical press, and in particular, on the influence of medical thinking and the science of the mind on the writing of James Hogg (1770-1835). The applicability of twentieth-century psychology to Hogg’s masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), is largely responsible for Hogg’s entrance into the modern world canon, and the tension between rational scientific and traditional supernatural explanations in Hogg’s corpus is now a critical commonplace. However, critics have been hesitant to recognise Hogg’s voice in the proto-psychological polemics of his era. The ongoing publication of the Stirling/South Carolina Research edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg has catalysed revisionist scholarship in Hogg studies and is leading to a growing recognition of his pervasive connections within the diverse intellectual culture of the era. This thesis examines his connections to the little-known Glaswegian surgeon and writer, Robert Macnish (1802-1837). Like Hogg, Macnish was an active contributor of short prose fiction and poetry to the Romantic periodical press, and at the same time, he worked as a practicing surgeon in Glasgow, publishing three popular medical texts: The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1827), The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), and An Introduction to Phrenology (1836). These texts engage with popular debates in the periodical press, including the reciprocal relationship between the mind and body, particularly regarding altered-states of consciousness, as well as methodologies in the science of the mind. Macnish’s literary contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country under his pseudonym, ‘A Modern Pythagorean’, deal with similar themes, and by examining Hogg’s literary and biographical connections to Macnish, a clearer picture of Hogg’s engagement with medical thinking and the science of the mind is created. Macnish’s dedication of a dream-poem to ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ and the utilisation of an extract from Hogg’s poem The Pilgrims of the Sun (1815) as a headpiece in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) are the starting points for the first section, while Karl Miller’s assertion in Cockburn’s Millennium (1975) that Hogg’s Confessions may have influenced Macnish’s Blackwoodian prose fiction is examined in the second section. The final section questions why Macnish chose to use ‘James Hogg’ as his nom de guerre for his short prose tale, ‘A Psychological Curiosity’, published in The Scottish Annual (1836), and examines Miller’s assertion that Macnish’s Blackwoodian tale, ‘The Metempsychosis’ (1826), may have influenced Hogg’s tales, ‘On the Separate Existence of the Soul’ (1831) and ‘Strange Letter of a Lunatic’ (1830), both published in Fraser’s. It is concluded that Hogg and Macnish shared numerous preoccupations and influenced one another’s writings over the course of many years. The connection between moral virtue and health pervades both authors’ corpuses, as the relationship between cause and effect is literalised through physically and therefore mentally transformational experiences. The engagement of both authors with the debate surrounding the explained supernatural has a profound impact on their writings, and both are preoccupied with the methodologies of the science of the mind, including the metaphysics of the common sense philosophers and the ‘bump-reading’ of the phrenologists. By the end of his career, Macnish fully ascribed to the explanatory power of phrenology. In contrast, Hogg remains resistant to place full faith in modern conceptualisations of natural law, while also forwarding an embodied theory of the imagination, the mind, and the soul. For Hogg, one comes closest to a divine understanding of the natural world through aesthetic experience and imaginative belief, which ready the mind and body for the joys of the world to come. Finally, Hogg, as an autodidactic peasant-poet, was himself an object of study in the science of the mind, but an examination of the relationship of his life and writing to that of Macnish reveals that he was both ‘a psychological curiosity’ and psychologically curious.

This thesis examines the treatment of failure in the experimental fiction of Alan Burns, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin in order to reconsider their work’s faltering relationship to postwar British culture. The thesis reassesses the significance of failure in these authors’s experimental fiction by drawing on Ewa Ziarek’s analysis of the affiliation between modernism’s aesthetics of failure and the deconstruction of scepticism. Following Ziarek, it reads failure in the experimental texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin through the lenses of the philosophical revision of scepticism and of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other to argue that we can rethink these novelists’s haunting relationship to postwar British culture by tracing their works’s ethical dimension. This methodology allows for a critical reinterpretation of the relationship between these experimental fiction writers and the postwar British public as it was imagined by a key supporter and funder of their work – the Arts Council of Great Britain. Though the Arts Council’s subsidization of postwar culture enabled the production of these experimental fictions, this thesis suggests that it also inhibited their modes of articulation through its subtle marshalling of the norms and conventions of the public, and thereby contributed to a tendency to misrecognize the significance of failure in these authors’s works. The first chapter introduces Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin by sketching their fleeting formation as a group in the late nineteen-sixties, and their relationship to the Arts Council. The chapter then elaborates on the thesis’s methodology by exploring how a sense of failure also haunted Raymond Williams and Doris Lessing’s attempts to rethink the relationship between culture and community in postwar Britain. The chapters that follow focus in turn on texts by Figes, Johnson, Burns, and Quin in order to outline the relationship of their work to different discursive communities and to devise new ways to read the ethical significance of failure in their experimental fictions. As a whole, the thesis argues that a rereading of failure in the texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin can shed light on the lasting legacy of experimental writing in postwar British culture.

This thesis comprises an original novel, Reading Through Binoculars, and a critical commentary: a story about stories. Binoculars charts the journey of Miti Popov, as he goes in search of his missing mother across Bulgaria. An avid reader, the books Miti reads begin to impose themselves upon the people and places he encounters on his travels. Side by side with Miti’s narrative are a series of short stories, the stories on the wind, written when he is much older, and extracts from his father’s notebook, a sense of history: a blind man’s view of Bulgaria. The critical commentary explores the processes of writing the novel and how theories of intertextuality and relationships between text and the reader, the construction of national identities in Bulgaria’s past and present, and notions of cosmopolitan theorist’s awareness of difference were all influential upon, and filtered into, the writing of binoculars.