No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This research deals with questions of authority and authenticity and how they are expressed, constructed, and appropriated within the Anglophone book market. It considers the body of literature written about ex-Yugoslavia since the 1990s Balkan conflicts by exiled writers from the region which has entered the international literary canon. Books’ routes from original publishers into English translation are discussed through practices of trust, one of the crucial social devices underpinning their exchange. Within these cross-cultural processes, the role of cultural brokers is crucial. Symbolic and cultural resources are specifically mobilised through their powerful author brands. By exploring authenticity in the context of book publishing, I further look at how ideas and practices of community are employed and negotiated by writers and those who promote their books. My field is multi-sited and fluid, reflecting how different individual and national positions are enacted and performed through strategies ranging from unconscious dispositions to deliberate intentions. This research thus brings together ideas of the author as an authentic, representative voice together with exile as a position that grants them a new lease of relevancy in the post-socialist context. Although ex-Yugoslav books occupy a ‘high end’ niche of the UK market, constrained by commercial as well as political, cultural, and institutional forces, in public discourse ideas of the ‘free market’ and ‘free speech’ are mobilised to produce various types of modernisation narratives. The (post)socialist production of literature is perceived as having to ‘evolve’ into a capitalist model: this would allow not only healthy competition and consumer choice but guarantee an individual writer ‘free speech’ as a basic human right. Therefore, the most general question this research raises is what kind of foreign literature gets translated into English, under what socio-cultural conditions and which politics of representation it serves within the project of world literature.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the translation phenomenon of fantasy fiction in Taiwan, with the help of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological model. The application of a sociological approach to translation studies allows an examination of the social and cultural nature of translation by locating this activity within social structures. One of the aims of the thesis is to discover to what extent Bourdieu's sociological model can elucidate a translational phenomenon when compared with other models in translation studies. To fulfil this aim, the similarities and differences between Bourdieu's theoretical framework, Even-Zohar's polysystem model and Toury's concept of translational norms are discussed. It is postulated that the imposition of the concept of norms on Bourdieu's notion of habitus would reinforce the explanation of translation agents' practices in both the micro-structural and macro-structural investigation of the translation of fantasy fiction. The micro-structural investigation was conducted by employing a parallel corpus study of fantasy translations: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone and Philip Pullman's Northern Lights. The aim of this comparison is to examine translation agents' textual translatorial habitus when dealing with culture-specific items (CSIs). The results revealed a source-oriented tendency when translating CSIs. The evidence from the textual analysis was interpreted and discussed in terms of the interaction between the translatorial habitus and the constraints and opportunities determined by the literary field. This thesis also aims to understand the production mode of fantasy fiction translation in Taiwan by means of a macro-structural investigation. The focus in this phase of the research is on how translation agents tend to develop particular choices and directions for texts, and which socio-cultural determinants govern their decision-making process. Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus were deployed in placing the translation activity within the broader and complex social and institutional network in which translation agents operate. The strategies of the producers of fantasy fiction translations and the tensions exerted in this cultural field were examined through in-depth interviews with translation agents. The data indicated that the production of translation of fantasy fiction in the literary field in Taiwan was conditioned by the logic of the market which is inherited by the heteronomous struggles from other fields outside of the literary field, so that a tendency toward prioritising the profitability of the translated products emerged.

Translation is regarded as a constrained activity (Boase-Beier & Holman, 1999: 7). During the process of translation, there are inevitably factors that influence the translator. However, the factors influencing Taiwanese translators have rarely been investigated in translation studies. This is especially so of the time in the late 1980s when society, culture, and politics were in rapid transition. This study sets out to investigate potentially influential factors operating on Taiwanese translators during the translation process by considering three translations focusing on gender and race issues in the novel The Color Purple. Three versions were translated into Chinese in the same year, 1986. Such a rare occurrence gives us the opportunity to examine how these potentially influential factors, particularly the ones from the wider social context, affected each translation, and to draw wider implications for how translators tackled issues of gender and race in a socially sensitive context. The study adopts and modifies Chesterman's causal model (1992) as the theoretical framework; the study also uses Leuven-Zwart's transeme model (1989) and the concept of critical discourse analysis to investigate semantic shifts and ideological concerns in the gender and race issues in the three Taiwanese versions. Interviews are used to provide additional data. Our findings suggest that each translator, while tackling ideologies of anti-sexism and anti-racism in the original text, was influenced by individual factors, leading to divergent re-presentations. Nonetheless, rather than simply being influenced and conditioned, these variables to some extent empowered the translators to push the boundary of the prevailing attitudes in their translations. The translators' decisions on linguistic items, therefore, became their distinctive, personal responses to the target society, the translation field and the original.

This thesis comprises a narrative poem and a commentary that traces its inspiration. The struggle for the control of the Niger Delta has fascinated historians, anthropologists, journalists and Nigerian writers, poets and memoirists; The Prophet, The Pirate and The Witch is a unique narrative contribution to this intriguing subject at a time when the region has become an ongoing trouble spot and flashpoint of conflict between Christian, Islamic and African traditional cultures. The protagonist of the narrative, Isaiah Kosoko, becomes a prophet to escape the clutches of Falila Soares, the witch who loves him. Isaiah‘s best friend Segida Okokobioko marries Falila on the rebound but is forced to become a pirate/freedom fighter – fighting the state and oil conglomerates for causing pollution and unfair distribution of resources from oil wells. In the midst of the love triangle, land and people suffer. The critical commentary provides a context for the inspiration, crafting and interpretation of the poem. It explores my debt to the Bible, situating my narrative in relation to the similarly inspired poetic works of Christopher Okigbo of Nigeria and the Ghanaian-born Caribbean Kwame Dawes. It also examines Nigerian poets across four generations and demonstrates my indebtedness to the political and social agitation that has been a major aspect of their work. I am particularly interested in the tradition of poetic prophecy, exploring the figure of the poet–prophet as a commentator on, and an instrument of, social–economic–political–cultural change. The metaphors that might position some Nigerian poets as possible prophets, others as pirates and yet others as witches, have been sketched. The prophetic agitation for change as an intrinsic part of African orality and its influence on modern African writers has inspired this creative work, which uses a written mode to express an oral form, in a prose–poetic amalgam typical of biblical narratives.

My thesis tracks the human body in cyberspace as a popular cultural construct, from its origins in cyberpunk fiction in the 1980s to the pervasion of cyberspatial narratives in contemporary fictions, along with its representations within wider cultural texts, such as film, the mainstream media, and on the Internet. Across the two respective sections of the thesis, I focus upon six recurring literal-metaphorical characters, entities or motifs which serve as points of collision, entanglement and reiteration for a wide variety of discourses. These figures—the avatar, the hacker, the nanotechnological swarm, the fursona, the caring computer, and the decaying digital—have varying cultural functions in their respective representations of the human/technological interface. Informed by theorists such as Donna Haraway (1991, 2008), N. Katherine Hayles (2001) and others, I trace both their origins and their shifting and (often increasingly prolific) representations from the 1980s to the present. This allows me to uncover these figures’ registering of contextual discourses, and permits, in turn, an interrogation of the extent of their normative character, along with measuring how and to what extent, if any, these figures may offer alternative visions of human (and other) subjectivity. It also permits a rethinking of “cyberspace” itself. Section One analyses three figures that depict the human/technological interface as a space for reinscribing and reifying Cartesian dualistic views of human subjectivity, along with the exclusive and marginalising implications of the remapping of that dualism. The figures in Section One—the avatar, the hacker, and the nanotechnological swarm—have their roots in the 1980s, and have stratified over time, commonly deployed in describing the human/technological interface. These figures function in first evoking and then managing the threats to the unified masculine subject posed by the altering human/machine relationship, policing rather than collapsing the subjective boundaries between them. They maintain and reiterate their attendant logics of identity, recapitulating an image of technology as the object of human invention, and never a contributor to the substantiation of the human subject. Science fiction–especially cyberpunk—has at least partially set the terms for understanding present-day relationships between humans and technologies, and those terms are relentlessly humanistic and teleological, despite their putatively postmodern and fragmentary aesthetic. The threat of the technological other is almost invariably femininecoded, and my work in this section is explicated particularly in the light of Haraway’s work and feminist theories of embodiment, including the work of Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Margrit Shildrick (1997, 2002). Section Two analyses three emerging figures—ones not so clearly and widely defined in fiction and popular culture—that depict the human/technological interface as fundamentally co-substantiating, rather than the latter being the product of the former. Acting as nodes of connection and constitution for various phenomena both depicted in fiction and enacted/performed at the human/technological interface itself, these three figures—the fursona, the caring computer, and the decaying digital—demonstrate potential ways to understand the human/technological interface outside of conventional, dualistic discourses of transcendental disembodiment of a bounded subject-self. Deploying theoretical work on concepts such as Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (2004) and Brian Massumi’s reading of the “real-material-but-incorporeal” body (2002), as well as Haraway’s later work on companion species (2008), I position these figures as representative visions of technologically-mediated subjectivity that allow us to imagine our relationships with technology as co-operative, open and materially co-substantiating. I argue that they recover the potential to rupture the unified and dualistic mind-subject that is both represented and contained by the figures seen in Section One, while reflecting a more recognisably prosaic, ongoing transformation of subjective participants in human/technological encounters. In opening up these two respective clusters of human-technological figures, I map two attendant visions of cyberspace. The first is the most common: the smooth, Euclidean grid into which the discrete unified consciousness is projected away from the body, which is conflated with (a reductive understanding of) virtuality, and to which access is allowed or denied based on highly conventional lines of gender, race, sexuality and so on. The second vision is emerging: it is possible to view cyberspace as less of a “space” at all, and more of a technologically-mediated field of material implication—one which is not discrete from the putatively offline world, which is implicit in the subject formation of its users and participants, and accounts for, rather than disavowing, the physical, bodily substrate from which it is explicated.

The thesis consists of an edited text conservatively based on the manuscript of the original version of The Humorists, an introduction, a textual introduction and critical apparatus, and a commentary on the text. The textual introduction argues the presence of Shadwell's own hand in alterations made to the manuscript and hence its authority as copy-text. Early published editions of the play (those of 1671,1691 and 1720) are collated in the critical apparatus. The introduction describes Shadwell's early life and literary career, offering fresh evidence concerning his authorship of parts of The Triumphant Widow and its effect on Dryden's treatment of the "hero" in MacFlecknoe. It examines attitudes to personal satire in classical times, in the plays of Ben Jonson and in the Restoration period. Shadwell's own practice in The Sullen Lovers is analysed to demonstrate his combination of personal and general satire and to show the clear influence on him of some of Martial's Epigrams. The manuscript version of The Humorists and the published version are compared in detail, and an attempt is made to explain the alterations. Many of them are seen to be due to pressure exerted by the whoremasters of the time (possibly including the Duke of York) and by Lady Castlemaine. The powerful influence of Ben Jonson on The Humorists is discussed (in terms both of Shadwell's direct plagiarisms from Jonson and of more general borrowings. Finally, the manuscript version of the play is critically assessed as being a successful example of comic satire, dealing with the commercialisation of love and marriage in a way that was far more effective than was shown in the published version of the play.

Bahram Beyzaee, the Iranian playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker, and Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian poet, playwright, and novelist have produced artistic works that transcend the limitations of time and locality to become powerful comments on human life and socio-political and cultural institutions. This research study examines the major themes and dramatic techniques of these two writers to demonstrate how, in two very different cultural settings, traditional modes and themes appear in modem art forms to renegotiate cultural identity. I argue that both writers place themselves in a post postcolonial position which rather than being concerned about 'writing back against the centre' reflects on the cultural shortcomings that leaves their people at the mercy of vicious internal and external forces. I also demonstrate how they demythologize the traditional superstitious beliefs that haunt the present, foreground the inauthenticity of the modern hybrid obsessions that distort everyday life in their countries and mythologize and glorify the positive aspects of history and contemporary life to redefine cultural identity in terms of the best their cultures can offer. The first two chapters give an account of the history of Iranian and Nigerian performance forms in the context of socio-political, cultural, literary and artistic movements and traditions. The third chapter proceeds to present a short discussion of the theatrical vision and themes of Beyzaee and Soyinka and embarks on a general comparison of the two writers. Chapter four is focused on Beyzaee and Soyinka's depiction of the intellectuals as sacrificial heroes whose death may initiate social purgation and cultural regeneration and liberation. Chapter five is less mythical and more sociopolitical. It is a reflection on the writers' portrayal of women in their works and their success or failure in transcending literary and cultural stereotypes in a world where the means of production and socio-economic facts and the cultural developments associated with them demand a rapid movement away from patriarchal values. Chapter six is devoted to the study of another major issue in the process of cultural transition, namely, redefining the position of ethnic minorities in the myth of nationhood. This last chapter is followed by a brief conclusion, discussing the results and the future possibilities of drama in the context of rapid transition.