In this thesis I argue that matron lit gives over-forties women a voice within contemporary popular fictional texts that they have previously been denied. This genre began to emerge around the turn of the twenty-first century as a sub-genre of chick lit and is now firmly entrenched in the mainstream of popular fiction. Contemporary popular fiction aimed at the baby-boom market has established its readership steadily. For the first time older female readers of popular fiction have heroines to whom they can relate. Matron lit discusses the gains and losses that are encountered by ageing women in Western society. Cultural attitudes about ageing and gender operate together to marginalise older women. Matron lit contributes to the debate around ageing and gender by reporting and exposing gendered and ageist discourses. In order to explore the impact of fictional narratives that represent the lives of older women, I draw on the work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. These theorists provide a frame of reference that assist an understanding of the constructive discourse which promotes normative cultural concepts of ageing and gender. In reporting on gendered ageist discourses matron lit exposes the repetitive linguistic process that undermines mature, female identities. While matron lit sometimes simply recites ageist discourses, it occasionally challenges them directly and frequently subverts them through irony. The particular issues which I explore over five chapters are: The importance of body image and sexuality, in the lives of matron lit heroines. The effect of ageist attitudes on wellbeing. The significance of home for matron lit heroines. The relevance of relationships and friendships to mature women. The pursuit of ‘liminal’ space where post-reproductive women can re-evaluate their purpose.

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This thesis uses a multidisciplinary approach drawing primarily on archival and bibliographical research as well as the fields of children’s literature, book history and translation to explore British translation of Nordic children’s fiction since 1950. Which works of Nordic children’s literature have been published in the UK during the period in question? And how were Nordic children’s authors and texts selected by British publishers, along with British translators and illustrators? Chapter One gives an overview of limited past research in this area, focusing on publishing and book history and Translation Studies (particularly Polysystem Theory). Chapter Two considers bibliographical research already undertaken in Children’s Literature Translation Studies and is followed by a detailed study of the British National Bibliography (1950-2000). This methodological approach has documented for the first time the depth and breadth of the corpus of British translations of Nordic children’s fiction since 1950, enabling key authors, publishers, translators and genres to be identified. A brief analysis is given of the Golden Age of Nordic children’s literature in British translation up to 1975, followed by a decline into the twenty first century. The thesis then goes on to examine the principles and practices of text and translator selection as its second major research element, with extensive use made here of archival sources. Chapter Three explores publishing archives as a research resource and details issues in their distribution and potential use. Chapter Four gives an overview of the key role of the editor as a centre pin in the process of publishing works in translation, drawing on a wide range of publishing archives as well as introducing the case study part of the thesis which examines an independent press and a major international academic publishing house. Chapter Five looks in detail at the role of author-educator-publisher Aidan Chambers in publishing Nordic children’s literature in the early 1990s through small press Turton & Chambers. Chapter Six examines the role of Oxford University Press in publishing Nordic authors from the 1950s to the 2010s, in particular Astrid Lindgren. This thesis aims to make a significant and unique scholarly contribution to the hitherto neglected study of the translation of children’s literature into British English, offering a methodological framework (bibliographical and archival) which has potential for use with other language systems and with adult literature in translation.

In his encyclopaedic work On the Properties of Things, John Trevisa describes water as 'able'. Water is an element which has no determinate properties of its own but which takes up properties from its surroundings and, at the same time, enacts change on those surroundings. This thesis argues that the inherent flexibility or 'ableness' of water, which Trevisa and other encyclopaedic writers identify, is crucial to late-medieval understanding of the element and, in turn, informs its use in a variety of religious writings. The multivalent potential of water enables devotional writers to use references to the element to symbolise and articulate access to God whilst they simultaneously deploy it as a metaphorical limiting agent that can regulate this access. Although there has been some critical attention paid to certain kinds of water in late medieval devotional prose, this thesis contains the first holistic study of various manifestations of water. It considers the material and historical realities of water in the Middle Ages as well as representations of water in different literary genres and demonstrates the 'ableness' of water within them. These findings are then used to shed light on a specific genre: spiritual guides authored by men and addressed to women, from the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. The thesis identifies a literary language of water in late medieval devotional prose - a complex and recurrent set of images that authors draw upon to explicate Christian doctrine and portray different aspects of religious life. These images provide the organisational structure of the thesis. Three significant tropes of water are considered in light of its 'ableness': the imagined and encouraged relationship between water and the body in spiritual guidance, the importance of laundering the soul in such works, and the relationship between blood and water in Passion meditations.

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This thesis uses previously unstudied female authored blog narratives to explore the role the author’s anonymity plays in the way they textually construct themselves and their offline experiences. It thereby reconceptualises not only what it means to be anonymous online, but also how anonymity is utilised by users regardless of their perceived level of hiddenness. Unlike previous research into the genre, it considers blogs as part of the trajectory of life-writing, which includes autobiography and diaries, and therefore examines the narratives using close textual literary analysis. The thesis also acknowledges the fact that the content of blogs is inherently influenced by the form itself, and therefore looks at the texts in the context of their online platform and its technological features. It subsequently shows blogs to be a constantly updated example of contemporary culture, which represent not just an individual voice, but new ways of examining broader social realities. The analysis examines how the blogosphere could specifically offer a platform for women, who are often discouraged from speaking up in the offline public sphere, to share their stories and have a ‘public’ voice online. It therefore provides a detailed insight into a selection of female authors who have chosen this medium, interrogates the ways in which they utilise the potential anonymity that the online world offers them, and demonstrates to what extent the blogosphere could therefore be regarded as a space where women can represent alternative, and potentially transgressive, performances of self. Its methodology and theoretical framework mean that the analysis provides a more detailed insight into how and why women are seen to dominate this platform than existing research has thus far been able to. The findings therefore go beyond previous conceptualisations of female blog users, and of the blogosphere more broadly; highlighting the extent to which the medium of blogging represents a powerful place for women to write themselves.

This thesis is intended to document and explain the peculiarly high incidence of monsters in English children's literature, where monsters are understood in the term's full etymological sense as things which demonstrate through disturbance. In this context, monsters are frequently young people themselves; the youthful protagonists of children's literature. Their demonstrative operation typically functions not only as an overt or covert tool by which to educate children's literature's implied child audience, but also as a wider indicator - demonstrator - of adult appreciations of and arguments over children and how children should be permitted to grow. In this latter role especially, children are rendered truly monstrous as alienated and problematic tokens in adult cultural arguments. They can fast become such efficient demonstrators of adult crises that their very presence engenders all the notions of unacceptability with which monsters are characteristically associated. The chronological range of this thesis' study is the eighteenth-century to the present. From this period, the following children's authors, children's books, and series of children's books have been examined in detail: • Thomas Day: Sandford and Merton • Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose for Children • Sarah Trimmer: Fabulous Histories • Mary Martha Sherwood: The Fairchild Family • Charles Kingsley: The Water-Babies • Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass • George MacDonald: At the Back of the North Wind • J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan, and Peter and Wendy • C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Last Battle) • J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter {The Philosopher's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, and The Half-Blood Prince). The theoretical notions of monsters and monstrosity that are used to discuss these texts draw principally on the writings on the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the uncanny by Sigmund Freud, and the fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov.

Focusing attention on a neglected aspect of Renaissance scholarship, this study aims to illuminate the rhetorical role of the body in Renaissance literature by exploring the rhetorical nature of three forms of corporeality: stasis, gesture, and dance. Generally speaking, rhetoric of the body is not lacking in early modern scholarship. However, consideration of the literary body as a rhetorical entity that not only articulates but also creates meaning is indeed a neglected area. The body-as-text paradigm that grounds performance studies provides for a unique and nuanced approach to literary text analysis. The methodology employed in this thesis combines a historical and text-based approach, with substantial attention given to classical rhetoric because of its awareness of the rhetorical capacity of the body. The rhetoric of stasis is explored in Sir John Davies’ poem Orchestra and in three works by Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale, The Rape of Lucrece, and Coriolanus. In this chapter, trauma is presented as a framing mechanism for the characters’ static presence. Gesture and its rhetorical quality are studied through distinctive analyses of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, The Rape of Lucrece, and Titus Andronicus. An analysis of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene provides a comic close to this study of gesture. This chapter also has as its framework the concept of trauma, presenting it as either a cause for or effect of gesture. Finally, the rhetoric of dance is examined in further analyses of Orchestra and The Winter’s Tale and also in Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. The literary approach to the rhetorical study of stasis, gesture, and dance taken in this study includes its dramaturgical and compositional functions, providing for a new lens through which to view instances of corporeality in Renaissance literature. This project attends to the early modern awareness and understanding of the rhetorical capacity and force of the body, and does so in a way that allows the speaking body to be examined within original contexts, thus bridging literary and performance analysis.

This thesis examines the advisory function of the tales of three prophets (Joseph, David and Solomon) in al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 923/310 AH) History and al-Thaʿlabī’s (d. 1025/416) Tales of the Prophets within their religio-political contexts in Baghdād and Nīshāpūr respectively. The hypothesis is that by reading the tales through the prism of Islamic advice literature, in particular the works of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 757 / 139) and Kay Kāʾūs (d. 1084 /476), one sees how these stories convey important ideas about just leadership, friendship and enmity. The thesis, which is based on both a close textual and contextual reading of the tales, contrasts the perspective of the centre (Baghdād), where al-Ṭabarī lived and where caliphal power was situated in the late ninth century, with the view from the edge of the empire (Nīshāpūr), where al-Thaʿlabī lived in a religiously vibrant society. This dissertation, which comprises five chapters, begins by describing the genre of the Tales of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ) as adab (cultivated literature), because such works recapture pre-Islamic values and adapt them to Muslim contexts. Al-Ṭabarī’s view from the centre with respect to leadership is characterized by its deliberate distance from non-Islamic monarchical images and its suspicion of Ṣūfīsm. Al-Thaʿlabī’s position on the edge, on the other hand, weds royal images with Ṣūfī ideas, while cautioning against the excessive asceticism of the mystical tradition in Nīshāpūr. For leaders at the centre friendship relies on receiving good counsel which has the positive effect of creating stability in the Empire, whereas for leaders on the edge friendship promotes social harmony. Lastly, the centre and the edge both view enmity as emerging from the leaders’ family circle, but they advise leaders to practise diplomacy as jihād in order to win genuine converts. The centre promotes ṣabr (patient endurance) when confronting enmity, while the edge recommends prayer in coping with grief over calamities. Overall, the tales of the prophets are more than stories; they are lessons in leadership.

This practice-led thesis situates the experimental novella <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> within the context of interdisciplinary approaches to experimentation which cross the arts, humanities, literature and sciences. The novella and thesis develop a queer avant-garde poetics and writing methodology that I have called transliteracy. Transliteracy builds on my situated and embodied writing practice as a queer identified novelist and nonnative English speaker. I have mobilised the perceived 'otherness' of English to produce narratively and linguistically experimental prose fictions (Waidner, 2010, 2011). Transliteracy develops this practice by sharing agency (the capacity to influence the narrative) across assemblages of human and nonhuman, fictional and real, material and semiotic 'actors', to use the philosopher of science Bruno Latour's (1987, 1999) term for participants in action and process. Transliteracy has allowed me to subvert normative versions of authorship, intentionality, causality, and process in <i>Gaudy Bauble</i>, and to produce a radically subverted version of a plot that is intelligible and captivating to the reader. <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> inaugurates a genre I have called agential realist fiction, which is original in its genre-bending, gender-bending, interdisciplinary and queer avant-garde orientation. The practice was further shaped according to a generative constraint, which dictated that the most marginal actors on and beyond the page were made relevant for the plot. This conceptual apparatus is also reflected in the novella's narrative as a 'not quite' detective story: <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> stages what happens if previously inconsequential actors are allowed to become effectual, rather than actions located within a conventional protagonist. Enacting an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" (Foucault, 1980, p. 81) in fiction, <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> stages a landscape of reversed power relations, a locally subverted surface of emergence in fiction, where radically nonnormative phenomena and imaginaries can come into being. The thesis connects transliteracy to a wider political LGBTQI+ project and agenda.