This study considers the work of three women poets writing in English during the period 1970-2000. I argue that the poets, Eavan Boland, Michele Roberts and Jackie Kay are all `hybrid' voices, positioned and positioning themselves on the borders between different cultures and traditions. Locating the poets within a specific social, cultural and intellectual context the study considers the different ways in which the poets negotiate these mixed heritages and how gender interacts with their cultural location to affect the poetic identities they inhabit. My study of Eavan Boland locates her as a post-colonial poet writing out of a very specific historical relationship with Britain. I argue that the effects of this relationship are explored in two ways; the political and psychic legacy of the British colonisation of Ireland but also the ways in which women in Ireland have been colonised by a nationalist poetic tradition. I show how Boland interrogates these different colonisations and drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha I argue that Boland finds her own hybrid space in the Dublin suburbs from where she explores the frictions between a number of conflicting positions. My study of Michele Roberts explores the effects of her dual French and English heritage on her writing. I argue that Roberts' desire to embrace both aspects of her identity manifests itself as a desire to reconcile what western dualistic thinking has split and separated. I consider how Roberts advocates a writing and reading practise which asks us to embrace the stranger within ourselves and so begin to heal the split within individuals and nations. My chapter on Kay explores how she negotiates the cultural specificity of her location as a Scottish writer who identifies as black and how her poetry complicates questions of cultural authority and theories of cultural hybridity. I argue that Kay through a focus on `performance' as both theme and aesthetic subverts simple fixed notions of identity. I conclude that all three poets problematise any simple notion of home and belonging as a fixed and immutable space. Rather they inhabit borderlands, unsettled spaces, where there is a constant interaction and reformulation of identity.

Dans un contexte postmoderne où la perception du réel est affaiblie, les arts mimétiques, auxquels la littérature ressortit, sont désormais à même de proposer une nouvelle lecture du monde, géocritique, où interviennent la théorie littéraire, la géographie culturelle et l’architecture. Actuellement, le roman semble tout englober et, en focalisant notre étude sur la représentation de l’espace qu’il propose, nous sommes conscient de réduire sa portée. Mais il nous procure, outre le plaisir de lecture, des réponses claires et décisives à la question du traitement de l’espace dans la littérature policière, dans notre cas spécifique dans le roman noir contemporain. Notre ouvrage se situe donc dans le domaine de la géocritique afin de définir une «compossibilité» entre l’espace référentiel et sa représentation fictionnelle dans les romans noirs de Lorenzo Silva, Patrick Raynal et Massimo Carlotto. Dans cette perspective, la géocritique peut devenir un véritable modèle d’analyse pour le roman noir, fournissant un support actif en connaissances potentiellement utiles lors de la production des processus narratifs. En tant que champ d’investigation qui mêle à la fois une étude anthropologique, la sociologie, la géographie, la philosophie et la cartographie, la géocritique nous donne la possibilité de transcrire l’expérience des lieux (modes de perception et de production de l’espace) évoquée par nos auteurs dans leurs romans et, en même temps, d’enrichir le vocabulaire du «lexique spatial» à travers la création de nouveaux concepts. Les œuvres de notre corpus (El alquimista impaciente, La estrategia del agua, Nice-est, Un tueur dans les arbres, Nord-est, Arrivederci amore, ciao), chacune selon sa mesure, introduisent des éléments d’hétérogénéités qui contribuent à rendre plus manifeste la perception sensorielle, ou sensuelle, que les auteurs ont de l’espace. / In a postmodern context where the perception of reality appears weakened, mimesis is now able to introduce a new interpretation of the world we live in. This new perspective is analyzed by Geocriticism where various studies such as literary theory, cultural studies and architecture are applied. Currently the literary fiction includes vast amount of themes, but we concentrate our study in spatial representation. Even though the novels give us the pleasure of reading, moreover they provide us the main answer to the representation of space regarding crime fiction, specifically the contemporary noir genre. Our work is related to Geocriticism in order to define an interaction between referential space and the fictional representation of crime novels of Lorenzo Silva, Patrick Raynal and Massimo Carlotto. Geocriticism in this context is capable to become an ideal model of analysis providing full acknowledgement support to form different narrative modes. Furthermore, integrating the study of anthropology, sociology, geography, philosophy and cartography, it gives us a chance to interpret with ease the living spaces evoked by the authors in their novels. At the same time, Geocriticism enriches our lexicon via the creation of new concepts. The novels presented in our thesis (El alquimista impaciente, La estrategia del agua, Nice-est, Un tueur dans les arbres, Nord-est, Arrivederci amore, ciao), will introduce heterogeneous elements emphasizing the sensorial perceptions which the authors have of space.

What does it mean to link one's own history to that of another person or group of people? In what sense can a given history be 'one's own' or 'another's'? This thesis investigates movements between histories in three autobiographical texts which confront intergenerational shifts in language, triggered by the legacies of violent histories. Nabokov charts his movement from the Russian to the English language against the backdrop of the October Revolution, the Second World War and the Cold War. Perec's text confronts the silences in his family history produced by the death of his father in the Second World War and his mother's deportation to Auschwitz. His autobiography engages with a family history of displacement and movement between religious affiliations, countries, alphabets and languages, triggered by multiple waves of anti-Semitism, culminating with his mother's death in the Holocaust. Chamoiseau explores the ambivalent cultural and linguistic affiliations produced by a post- or neo-colonial childhood in Martinique. The thesis argues that in such contexts the links between the author's life and the lives of previous generations take on a central importance. Further, it demonstrates that each author goes beyond his own collective history to forge links between his life and those of other people who have lived through or are still suffering the legacies of different histories of violence and oppression. Though these movements have sometimes been noted, the original contribution of this thesis is that it argues such movements are central to the autobiographical texts under discussion. It looks at why and how inter-generational shifts in language inflect these authors' approach to the connections between their own histories and those of other people, and tests what is to be gained when the critic takes up the comparative interpretive framework these texts establish. By opening up a dialogue between these texts and a range of current theories of traumatic memory, inter-generational transmission of memory and 'multidirectional' memory, it finds that a comparative approach has the potential to enrich and nuance current debates in these areas.

My thesis is concerned with Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), the Frankfurt School theorist, and the implications of his philosophy for literary studies. I show that Adorno's thought may offer a valid contribution to the analysis of literary texts, even texts with which he is not historically associated. More specifically, I link Adorno with texts that emerge out of situations of political extremity but are not necessarily understood as "political" protest literature. Drawing on a variety of Adorno's texts, I assert that key concepts within Adorno's thought - truth content, immanence, the non-identical - allow us a way of understanding literary texts that appear apolitical, but in fact are speaking to the social and material relations of their specific (political) context. Adorno's exposition on the interface between the artwork and history usefully engages authors that problematise or dismantle our traditional conception of what constitutes the "political" - overt manifest content that aligns itself with a particular ideological position. I have chosen three twentieth-century authors (J.M. Coetzee; Margarita Karapanou; Michael Ondaatje) whose literature bear the burden of political extremity (respectively, South African apartheid, the 1970s Greek military junta, and the Sri Lankan civil war), and is at loggerheads with the literature of political commitment emerging from each of those situations. Each of these authors asserts his or her aesthetic autonomy over prescriptive understandings of literature as a vehicle actively espousing a particular nationalist, political, ideological or even aesthetically formalist position. The work of these authors, I argue, embodies an alternative Adornian version of engaged literature. In short, my thesis operates as a two way conversation asking: "What can Adorno's concepts give to certain literary texts?", and reciprocally, "What can those texts give to our traditional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?" This thesis is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.

The werewolf is a stock character in Gothic horror, exemplifying humanity's fear of 'the beast within', and a return to a bestial state of being. Central to this is the idea that the werewolf is, once transformed, without language. Using an ecoGothic approach, this thesis will offer a new approach in literary criticism regarding the werewolf. It argues that the werewolf has become a vehicle for our ambivalence towards the wolf, which itself has become a symbolic Gothic Other. Using interdisciplinary source materials, such as natural histories, fairy tales, and folklore, the notion of the 'symbolic wolf' is interrogated, particularly in relation to the dangers of the wilderness. Starting with Dracula, at the end of the nineteenth century, and finishing with an analysis of the contemporary, literary werewolf, this work explores how the relationship between humans and wolves has impacted on the representation of the werewolf in fiction. In particular, it will critique how the destruction of the werewolf is achieved through containing the creature using taxonomic knowledge, in order to objectify it, before destroying it. This precludes the possibility of the werewolf retaining subjectivity and reinforces the stereotype of the werewolf as voiceless. Following the growing awareness of environmentalism during the late twentieth century and, as humanity questions our relationship with nature, clear divides between the animal and the human seem arbitrary, and the werewolf no longer remains the monstrous object within the text. Central to this is the concept of the hybrid 'I' which this thesis exposes. The hybrid 'I' is a way of experiencing and representing being a werewolf that acknowledges the presence of the lycanthrope's voice, even if that voice is not human. Subjectivity is shown to be complex and myriad, allowing for the inclusion of human and non-human animal identities, which the werewolf embodies.

This thesis explores how wolves, and other animals, are represented in a variety of literary texts. At stake in these explorations is the shifting and problematic border between the human and the animal, culture and nature, civilisation and the wild. Because of its biological proximity to the domestic dog, as well as the ways in which it has been figured as both the ultimate expression of wild savagery and of maternal love, the wolf is an exemplary guide to this border. The wolf traces the ways in which the human/animal border has been constructed, sustained and transgressed. These border crossings take on a special resonance given the widespread sense of a contemporary environmental crisis. In this respect this thesis amounts to a contribution to the field of ecocriticism and pays special attention to the claim that the environmental crisis is also a 'crisis of the imagination', of our ideational and aesthetic relationship to the nonhuman world. With this in mind I look closely at some of the main currents of ecocriticism with a view to showing how certain psychoanalytic and poststructuralust approaches can enhance an overall ecocritical stance. It is an analysis which will also show how the sense of environmental emergency cannot be divorced from other critical and political concerns, including those concerns highlighted by feminist and postcolonial critics. In the words of a much favoured environmentalist slogan, 'everything connects to everything else'. Ultimately this thesis shows that how we imagine the wolf, and nature in general, in literary texts, is inextricably bound up with our relationship to, and treatment of, the natural world and the animals, including human beings, for whom that world is home.

Die Rezension bezieht sich auf den von der Forschergruppe "Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft" an der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften herausgegebenen Sammelband "Kulturtechnik Philologie". Es werden das Gesamtkonzept des Bandes und ausgewählte Artikel näher besprochen.:Besprochene Artikel: Glenn W. Most: Sehnsucht nach Unversehrten. Überlegungen zu Fragmenten und deren Sammlern Arndt Niebisch: Die Liebe zur Ziffer. Positionen einer posthumanen Philologie Ábel Tamás: Gefährliches Lesen und philologische Obhut. Kommentar zum Kommentar Balázs Déri: Prudentius\'' Weg in den Kanon

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Interpretation vier ausgewählter Filme des Filmemachers Ang Lee – Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Brokeback Mountain und Hulk, die in den Jahren 1992 bis 2005 entstanden. Sie erforscht die unterschiedliche Inszenierung von Konzepten der Männlichkeit im chinesischen und US-amerikanischen Kontext, sowie den Männlichkeitsdiskurs in Räumen des kulturellen Üergangs. Die Untersuchung Lees männlicher Figuren und Männlichkeitskonzepte macht sich sowohl die chinesische als auch die westliche erkenntnistheoretische Perspektive zu eigen, dabei ist Untersuchung sowohl konzeptionell als auch analytisch angelegt. Auf der konzeptionellen Ebene soll sie zeigen, wie sich die Konstruktion von Männlichkeitskonzepten unter der Einbeziehung nicht nur der westlichen konzeptionellen Argumentation von transkulturellen Räumen (Transdifferenz), sondern auch von andersartigen erkenntnistheoretischen Perspektiven, hier der chinesischen, besser erklären lässt. Auf der analytischen Ebene werden in der Untersuchung der Inszenierung männlicher Figuren audio-visuelle Textanalysen benutzt. Die Analyse hat deutlich die Komplexität und Vielfältigkeit der Aushandlung von Männlichkeitskonzepten in transkulturellen Räumen gezeigt, wobei die Rekonstruktion und die Neuverhandlung von Männlichkeit sowohl emanzipatorisch als auch repressiv von statten gehen kann. Männliche Protagonisten bei Lee finden drei unterschiedliche Wege, ihre männliche Identität zu konstruieren. Als erste Lösung unterdrücken sie den transdifferenten Aspekt und wählen die klare Zugehörigkeit zu einer der Kulturen, die dann als Ursprung für die Restauration der Männlichkeit dient. Die zweite Lösung ist das Annehmen der Transdifferenz um eine mehrdeutige maskuline Identität im transkulturellen Raum aufzubauen. Als letzte Lösung gelingt es einen männlichen Figuren, kulturelle Grenzen zu überschreiten und eine transkulturelle Männlichkeit zu manifestieren. / This dissertation consists of readings of four selected films by Ang Lee — Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Brokeback Mountain and Hulk, ranging over a decade from 1992 to 2005. It explores Lee’s representation of diverse Chinese and American masculinities, discussing negotiations of masculinities in transcultural spaces. My exploration of Lee’s representation of men and masculinities is equipped with double epistemological perspectives, namely, both Chinese and Western. My project is both conceptual and analytical. On the conceptual level, I intend to demonstrate how constructions of masculinities can be more productively explained by employing not only the Western conceptual arguments of transcultural space (transdifference) but also by reading this space from different epistemological perspectives, namely the Western and Chinese. On the analytical level, I employ audio and visual textual analysis in my examination of Lee’s portrayal of male figures. My analysis has clearly demonstrated the complexity and multiplicity in negotiations of masculinities in transcultural spaces, which can be both emancipatory and repressive in re-constructing and re-negotiating one’s masculinity. Male subjectivities in Lee’s films turn to three different ways to construct or reconstruct their manliness. First, men suppress trandifference and opt for a clear belonging to a certain culture, in particular, the culture of origin for masculinity restoration. Second, men embrace transidifference to construct an ambiguous masculine identity in transcultural spaces. Third, men might transcend cultural boundaries to demonstrate transcultural manhood.

Die Reihe ›Saxofodina‹ wird in lockerer Folge »Fundstücke zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte Sachsens in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit« präsentieren. Die Stücke sollen quellennah präsentiert, die Lektüre durch Übersetzung und Kommentar erleichtert werden. Der Reihentitel lehnt sich an die ›Celifodina‹ oder ›Himmlische Fundgrube‹ an. Ausgangspunkt dieses Traktats war das aufblühende Montanwesen auf dem Schneeberg, das den Augustinerprediger Johann von Paltz 1492 zu einer Reihe von Predigten animierte. Die daraus entwickelte ›Celifodina‹ sollte eines der erfolgreichsten Werke spätmittelalterlicher Frömmigkeitstheologie werden. »Fundstücke« referiert zum einen auf gänzlich Verborgenes, erstmals ans Licht Gefördertes, zum andern aber auch auf seit langer Zeit Verschüttetes, das hier in neuer Form aufs Neue ausgestellt werden soll. Dazu gehören Neufunde aus Archiven und Bibliotheken Sachsens, aber auch Funde, die Sachsen betreffen; weiterhin Editionen und Kommentare, aber auch Hilfs- und Findemittel zur sächsischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne. Wir hoffen, mit dieser Reihe an die vor bald einem Dreivierteljahrhundert weitgehend eingestellten Förderarbeiten im Stollen der sächsischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne anschließen zu können.

This thesis has evolved from William Blake's phrase, "Imitation is Criticism" written in the margin of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses on Art. As a concept central to the production and criticism of art, imitation has largely been explored in the philosophical context of aesthetics rather than in terms of its practical application in image-text studies of the Romantic period. It has also traditionally served as a marker for the period designation 'Romantic', which in image-text studies continues to be played out in terms of the transition from imitative to expressive modes of making and response. Yet this notion of periodization has proven problematic in studying the response to 'false criticism' within what Wallace Stevens calls that 'corpus of remarks about painting'. These remarks reveal an important tension within imitation as a way of making something like something else, but also as a means of characterizing the relationships that underpin that resemblance. This tension not only occupies a central place in the concurrent development of art criticism and literary criticism in the period, but also offers a new foundation for the interdisciplinary study of image-text relationships in the period. The thesis is divided into two parts, each guided by the important role that imitation plays in the fight against 'false criticism' with respect to the visual arts. The first part examines the tension within imitation from the standpoint of artists and connoisseurs who expressed concern about the excesses of description in asserting the need for a credible art criticism while at the same time realizing its inevitability. The second part examines the tension within imitation from the standpoint of the American artist Washington Allston and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both of whom used this tension to advantage in setting forth a lexicon and methodology that could account not only for the 'specific image' described, but also the geometrical and structural relationships that underpin that image.