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This thesis examines the relations between music and literature through fictional women musicians in nineteenth-century European literature and more particularly through their bodies. The female body appears to be a rich juncture between music and literature, facilitating musical references in literature as well as creating complex musical narrative systems anchored in social, cultural and scientific discourses of the long nineteenth century. All types of women musicians are examined (singers, instrumentalists, composers, and even listeners) along with different discourses on the body (social, philosophical and scientific), shedding a new light on gender and the arts. Our chronological as well as thematic approach strives to highlight a common representation of the body and of female musicians in literature. German Romantic texts thus present women musicians as elusive figures who play a key role in the impossibility to materialise the abstract. Realist and sensation novels are analysed through a clinical perspective on the body and envision female musicians as monomaniacs. On the contrary, fiction written by female authors introduces empowered musicians as priestess of art. Finally, fin-de-siècle novels stage the female body as a degenerate entity of society. The parallel analysis of literary case studies with different perspectives on the body posits the women-music-body triangle as a new approach to gender, music and literature.

This thesis focuses on fiction and poetry written by women who have migrated from former British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia, to Britain or North America; it explores how issues of race, gender, sexuality, belonging and power are raised through the writings‘ accounts of migration, displacement and changing identity. The thesis stresses the importance of these writings in addressing key issues in feminist politics and in women‘s lives, and in making significant contributions to these debates. It argues that women‘s migration, and literary accounts of migration, are important to feminism, as is feminism to understanding migration. Key texts include Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga; The Unbelonging, by Joan Riley; Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid; and No Language is Neutral, by Dionne Brand. I also draw on a number of other novels, poems and anthologies of migrant women‘s writings. The diversity of the texts by migrant women that form the basis of the thesis has shaped my understanding of the issues they raise; the breadth and variety of the writing calls for a wide range of critical approaches in order that the writing is, as far as possible, illuminated rather than constrained by any one critical model. I am committed throughout the thesis to a feminist approach which incorporates an attention to women‘s activism along with 'the theoretical'; and which takes seriously the personal/emotional implications both of the kinds of imbalances of power which many migrant women explore and resist in their writings, and of feminist theorising and practice. The thesis consists of six chapters, the middle four of which are organised into two pairs. I begin the thesis with a chapter looking at accounts of women‘s decisions and journeys of migration, and the personal, political and historical contexts in which their migration takes place. Chapters Two and Three, which are paired under the title 'Women and Place', examine the impact of migrant women‘s changing relationships with place, before and after migration, on their sense of home, belonging and identity. In Chapters Four and Five, I move on to address the significance of these writings in terms of feminist politics and contemporary debates about identity, difference and racism. I have paired the chapters under the common title 'Literary Activism' in order to highlight connections between reading, writing and political activism. In conclusion, the thesis looks at representations of women‘s emotional and bodily experiences of the liberatory and/or oppressive aspects of their migrations. It addresses the possibilities –or impossibilities—of migrant women living with, coming to terms with, and resisting their oppressions, both personally and politically. This final chapter brings together, and takes further, various issues addressed throughout the thesis, in terms of writers‘ portrayals of both the effects of migration on women‘s sense of themselves, and of their explorations and responses to the impact of migration.

This thesis begins with the claim that the most productive and stimulating manner of addressing the question of the animal is through an engagement with the writings of Jacques Derrida. In particular, it picks up on his comment in The Animal that Therefore I Am that “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry.” As such, the thesis explores the specific ways in which the resources of literature can be used in order to address what is possibly the most pressing ethical task of modern humanity. One of the central questions of the thesis concerns how what Derrida calls carnophallogocentrism can be confronted by literature. Through readings of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and the poetry and short stories of D.H. Lawrence, I explore how literature is uniquely placed to offer a sense of the radical otherness of nonhuman animals. In perhaps a contradictory manner, I also examine how literary resources can be used to evoke a sense of pity for nonhumans. There are two further important, and connected, areas of enquiry. The first relates to the position of man who is constructed in opposition to nonhuman animals and is given the right to put nonhumans to death. As such, I study how a variety of texts, chiefly J.M. Coetzee's Foe and Philip Roth's American Pastoral, reveal the fragility of some of the chief notions of humanism and give way to what has been theorised as posthumanism. The second engages with what Derrida calls “eating well.” This is a question which receives its most thorough investigation through a reading of Margaret Atwood's dystopian Maddaddam trilogy.

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The five MMS selected for consideration from among the eighteen known MSS. of the Chanson d'Aspremont have been chosen quite arbitrarily, the unity constituted by their all being preserved in the Bibliotheque national in Paris being merely of a practical interest. If other than practical justification is required, it is supplied by the discredit, into which the Lachmann method of classification has fallen since M. Bedier's revolutionary preface to his edition of the Lai de l'Ombre in 1913. Greater caution is now incumbent on the student of multiple MSS., and with the abandonment of the wild-goose chase for an archetype, the individual MS. acquires a new Independence and importance, and invites study on its own merits. In the case of the "Aspremont" MSS., already in 1890, Paul Meyer, noting their diversity, considered that the publication apart of several individual MSS. was a desirable preliminary to a critical edition, and this has already been realised for the interesting MS of Wollaton Hall. Strictly speaking, the study of one MS. involves the study of all the others: the present study, being, for practical reasons, chiefly concerned with the five Parisian MSS., cannot therefore pretend to completeness even for these but it may serve as a modest contribution towards their more complete study.

The aim of this study is to re-create the mental attitude of men and women living in the period 1640-80. The record has been built up from close scrutiny of the personal writings of individuals representative, so far as the materials allow of different ranks of society and different schools of thought. The method has been to gather from the Letters and Diaries the general mental qualities of the age, to group these under three headings, Intellectual, Moral and Emotional, and to devote a chapter to a discussion of each group, with copious illustration from the sources. The attitude thus depicted is mainly that of ordinary people, not of specialists in religion, politics or science, and where evidence is drawn from the writings of the latter class, it is in what may be termed their human rather than their professional aspect. The discussion involves a consideration of the effect of seventeenth century civil troubles on the individual or national mind. In the Introduction an attempt is made to show that until the Great War England has suffered no strain equal in intensity to that of the seventeenth century and detailed consideration of the mental outlook of the period 1640-80 suggests a theory of a special psychological relationship between this period and the twentieth century. Each chapter concludes with an exploration of this theory and an examination of typical twentieth century features which illustrate the analogy. The fourth chapter deals briefly with linguistic details which attracted attention during the course of the study, including a comparison of the colloquial and literary language of the time, a summary of interesting features of phraseology and spelling and a few points supplementary to the data of the New English Dictionary.

Godot ke Intezar Mein (Hindi), Godor Pratikshay (Bengali), Eppo Varuvaru (Tamil), Kalpo Ke Kalpana Mari Parvari Chhe (Gujarati), Edin Ahibo Teu (Assamese), Su Yee (Kashmiri): these are just some of the translations and adaptations of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot into Indian languages. They reveal how Beckett's chef d'oeuvre has reached every corner of the country, from Tamil Nadu in the South, to Kashmir in the North, Assam in the East, and Gujarat in the West. Just as Honoré de Balzac's fictitious Godeau returns prosperously from 'Les Indes' in Le Faiseur (1848), Beckett's Godot gains from the remarkable dissemination through a multilingual, multicultural, social, and political space of post-independence India. This thesis, divided into three parts, is a comparative study of the relation between Samuel Beckett's works and Indian prose fiction, drama, and cinema, from the moment when Beckett's oeuvre was first introduced in India. Engaging with recent debates on the concept of world literature, it assesses three phases that are pertinent to the three parts and the circulation of Beckett's works through India: 1) the topical-planetary phase: Beckett's influence on Anglo Indian novelists, starting with Salman Rushdie; 2) the world-making phase: the circulation of Beckett's works amongst Indian playwrights, based on themes, writing techniques and style; and 3) the canonical phase: Beckett's pervasive presence rather than direct influence in Indian mainstream and experimental cinema. Put together, these three parts form a three-phase evolution, and a conceptual framework for world literature. In exploring Beckett's influence, circulation, and pervasive presence in Indian literature, alongside adaptations and re-creations of Beckettian motifs, characters, and stylistic techniques, this thesis not only re-conceives of Beckett's place in world literature today, but it also presents a process by which his works achieve canonicity. Starting with the works of Rushdie, the thesis charters new territories where Beckett's works have found a place, while the comparative approach draws attention to the heterogeneous and complex nature of modern Indian literature.

This thesis is part of a commitment to re-edit all eight books of John of Salisbury's great treatise on politics for the Oxford University Press. The last edition, and the first critical edition, was that of C C J Webb (Oxford, 1909), which has since been accepted as the definitive text. My own examination of the manuscripts (which has been palaeographical and codicological as well as critical) has totally controverted that view and has enabled me to establish a text that, although still not perfect, represents the text as the author himself wrote it more exactly than any of the ten editions published to date. John's Policraticus, Metalogicon, Letters, and unfinished Historia Pontificalis, are used by historians as primary sources for the politics and education of the day, so that this thesis is the first stage of an enterprise that will greatly benefit the many mediaevalists and their students to whose work the Policraticus is of central or major concern.