The two aims of this thesis are to analyse how expressive language can be employed and translated in children's literature and also to investigate the roles of power and historicity in this. Using a corpus of twenty children's books (the thirteen Lemony Snicket works, the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and four books by Roald Dahl, The BFG, The Witches, Matilda, and George's Marvellous Medicine) and their forty-five translations to Swedish, I examine 749 examples of neologisms, 224 of names, 168 of idioms, 151 of allusions, 10 of puns, and 10 of dialects, for a combined total of 1322 distinct examples of expressive language and 1971 translations. I use quantitative, qualitative, and comparative analyses to study the examples of expressive language, their functions, and their translations. Based on this, I create a typology of expressive language and how it is employed, a typology of possible translatorial strategies for translating it, and I also show how the issues of power and time may influence the translation of expressive language in children's books. My findings suggest that in this corpus of texts, the authors frequently employ expressive language in ways that serve themselves rather than serving the child readers while some translators tend to assume that expressive language is too difficult or inappropriate for children and they therefore choose translatorial strategies that smooth out or remove such language, even to the extent of drastically changing features that the original authors purposely included. Additionally, this seems to have been the case in Sweden particularly during the period of the 1940s through the 1970s, which I suggest has something to do with world events and the ways in which they influenced the subject matter of children's literature and ideas about childhood

Departure from Ireland has long occupied a contradictory position in Irish national discourse, alternatively viewed as exile or betrayal. This thesis analyses how this departure as well as notions of home, identity and return are articulated in the narratives of three members of the Irish diaspora community in Argentina: John Brabazon’s journal The Customs and Habits of the Country of Buenos Ayres from the year 1845 by John Brabazon and His Own Adventures; Kathleen Nevin’s fictional memoir, You’ll Never Go Back (1946); and William Bulfin’s series of sketches for The Southern Cross newspaper, later published as Tales of the Pampas (1900) and Rambles in Eirinn (1907). I examine the extent to which each writer upholds or contests hegemonic constructions of Irishness and how their experience in the diaspora space, that is, what Avtar Brah defines as ‘the intersectionality of diaspora, border and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes’ as well as theirencounters with other inhabitants of that space influence identity construction. Drawingon Brah’s notion of home as both a ‘mythic place of desire’ and ‘lived experience of alocality’, I explore how these writers imaginatively construct Irishness and negotiate the dual identity of emigrant and potential returnee. I contend that each of these writers, to varying degrees, challenges the orthodox positionings of the Irish diaspora subject as backward-looking and the Irish emigrant as bound to the national territory, paradigms which are an important feature of anti-colonial nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Furthermore, I argue that they construct multiple subject positions in addition to contradictory notions of Irishness: national (implying fixed in place), essentialist and homogenous versus transnational, defined interms of diversity and multiplicity – ultimately contributing to the re-imagining of the Irish emigrant identity.

This research has been written up as a piece of creative writing and an accompanying reflexive rationale which explores childhood; learning to read and theories of reading and learning; reading, reading schemes and the National Curriculum; the creation of the picture book in terms of the text, image and narrative and how children respond to both the reading scheme book and the commercial picture book as reading material. The aim is to show how the fusion of text and image in Children's Picture Books are crucial to the development of Child Literacy. Using reflexive research, the thesis investigates the fusion of text and image in the picture book and discusses the different ways it can be used to create a desirable reading form. It then discusses the importance of what children read and how they read it before engaging in a series of experiments to gauge children's responses concerning the format of their reading books. The thesis then uses the results of these experiments to create and design a thirty-one picture storybook series based on the fusion of text and image, using a unique methodology called 'lost and found', for the pre-reader to fluent reader, of which two books are presented in this thesis. Through the ongoing reflexive rationale I describe this process as the writer and illustrator of the picture book material, namely the picture book maker. The thesis traces the evolution of the initial story concepts from the technical process to the final product or dummy book, then it evaluates how successful they might be in developing literacy. The thesis combines both reflexively critical and creative elements, though it is fundamentally a creative body of work, with an accompanying reflexive rationale, which is built on an underlying body of theoretical knowledge.

No description available.

This thesis explores the construction of upper- and middle-class children as readers and consumers in Victorian and Edwardian England, a period which witnessed the Golden Age of children’s literature and major reforms in education. Through the examination of dolls’ house play and representations of dolls’ houses in English children’s literature from the 1860s to the 1920s, as well as autobiographical accounts of childhood reading and playing in adult women’s memoirs, this thesis engages with recent scholarship on children’s literature, material culture and gender to demonstrate the relevance of dolls’ house play to children’s everyday life and their roles as readers, players, and consumers. The first part of the thesis gives an overview of dolls’ houses in history, looking at dolls’ houses in museum collections throughout Europe, from the seventeenth-century Nuremberg houses to Queen Mary’s dolls’ house now on display at Windsor Castle. Part Two examines dolls’ house play as represented in and inspired by children’s books and children’s reading practices. Drawing from children’s magazines, toy-making guides, and picture books featuring dolls’ house making, furnishing, and playing, I argue that playing with dolls’ houses and making their own toys enabled children to balance work and play, labour and leisure. I also show how dolls’ house play was important in the period’s development of pedagogical theories, of a children’s book and toy market, and in the construction of children as consumers. Part Three explores works by Edith Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, alongside other non-canonical children’s fiction that makes the dolls’ house a setting for fantasies about miniature worlds. I discuss the dolls’ house as a perfect domestic household in miniature and an enchanting miniaturised spectacle and argue that imagination and play contribute to girls’ learning and negotiating with domestic roles and domestic space.

This work explores the impact of the Spanish Civil War in Anglo-American literature, focusing on the work of three woman writers, Martha Gellhorn, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Nancy Cunard, who travelled to Spain during the war as reporters and volunteers. The war in Spain generated an extraordinary cultural response from its outbreak in 1936. Poets, novelists, filmmakers, painters, and photographers from all over the world were inspired by the conflict, which many saw as a fight between democracy and fascism. Cunard, Gellhorn, and Warner sided with the democratically-elected Republican government, and warned about the effects that the triumph of fascism in Spain could have in the rest of the world. This dissertation studies several works that have been generally overlooked by scholarly criticism, such as Sylvia Townsend Warner’s After the Death of Don Juan, Martha Gellhorn’s articles for the American magazine Collier’s Weekly, and the poetry of Nancy Cunard, among other texts. It explores Cunard’s work as a poet and a publisher in the context of the theories of socialist internationalism that are at the core of the spirit of transnational solidarity that motivated many writers to travel to Spain. It then provides an analysis of Warner’s historical novel considering her vision of the war as motivated by class inequality and by conflicting notions of tradition and progress. Finally, it looks at the journalistic work of Martha Gellhorn and the evolution of the subgenre of reportage during the war in Spain. Their contributions to the literature of the Spanish war complement the works of authors traditionally considered as canonical such as Orwell, Hemingway, Auden and Spender, and provide new valuable perspectives that throw light on the different meanings of the conflict in the literature of the 1930s.

This thesis explores how the Victorian concept of success – fundamental to Victorians’ understanding of themselves as such – was characterised and problematised by the demonstration of moral worth through material wealth. Critics, including David Trotter, ask ‘under what generic conditions have objects appeared as objects in a literary text?’ (Trotter 2008). I argue that between the 1840s and 1880s it is frequently the reflection of the discourse of success and failure in society, reflected through objects, that gives material things symbolic value within plot and form of realist novels, where success and failure are persistent themes. I analyse gender roles and the circulation of objects to uncover the instabilities of Victorian characterisations of success. Focus within Victorian society on the material qualities of objects and the sense of permanence that they could create led, I argue, to the creation of a Victorian ‘Reality Effect’ (Barthes 1968). Things were emptied of meanings created through their production or circulation in order to signify the moral and material success of their current possessor through an ostensibly uncomplicated materiality which was nonetheless deeply unstable. I suggest that the exhibitionist, performative nature of this culture of success offered a potentially powerful role for middle-class women, which realist novelists challenged on moral and political grounds while making use of its aesthetic. My three chapters trace reflections of this discourse in arenas from the triumphalist ‘public’ sphere of the Great Exhibition to the ostensibly ‘private’ sphere of the home. I evaluate Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Villette and The Portrait of a Lady in particular, but allude to other novels to prove the range and depth of the theme, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle, Karl Marx, and John Ruskin. Through their attitude to Victorian material culture, I attempt to see, as Dehn Gilmore puts it, ‘not what but rather how the Victorians saw’ in this culture of intensely moralised display. This reveals the conflicted attitudes of Victorian realist novelists to the culture of success and its role in the moral, economic and social challenges of Victorian culture.

No description available.

This thesis is an analysis of colonial writing, as colonial discourse, on indentured East Indians in British Guiana between 1838-1917. Its themes are resistance, creolisation and cultural diversity. I will show that throughout indenture, colonial writing on East Indians in British Guiana formed as substantial a part of resistance to the system of indenture as did the actions of the indentured East Indians themselves. I will further demonstrate that textual creolisation occurred in the way in which colonists became influenced by the emerging culture of colonial Guyana. The primary sources for this thesis include Colonial Office records, Parliamentary Papers, works of literature and missionaries' correspondence. I endeavour to provide a contrast to recent studies on indenture in British Guiana by looking at the combined role of Europeans and East Indians in the reformation and termination of the system. My work is a deliberate move away from historical studies of the Indian-Guyanese that isolate them from the colony's other ethnic groups, attempting to place them in the historical context of all the ethnic groups who resisted colonisation in Guyana. Due to the relative novelty of Indian-Caribbean studies, the role in indenture of minority groups such as the South Indian 'Madrasis', Muslims and tribal North Indians or 'Hill Coolies' has been largely ignored. Where relevant, using historical evidence, this thesis will address the role of these groups in resisting indenture and colonialism.

This doctorate is comprised of a critical thesis (30%) and a creative submission of poetry (70%). The critical thesis examines representations of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury on 22 June 1948, interrogating how it became symbolic shorthand for the beginnings of the post-war Caribbean diaspora to Britain, with a central place in the national historical imagination. Critics argue that the representation of the Windrush has undergone a dramatic transformation in its 65-year history, from its deployment in media discourses highlighting the problems of immigration, to its reclamation as a positive symbol of Black Britain at the turn of the century. The 1998 commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary were instrumental in this re-appropriation. This thesis examines depictions of the Windrush from the moment of its arrival to the present day, to argue that the ongoing centrality of the Windrush in the story of the Caribbean–British diaspora has obscured a longer, richer history of black presence in Britain while overlooking the imperial history which prompted the diasporic movements of Caribbean people to the imperial centre. The critical work of Chapters One and Two provides the context for my poetry collection Chan, which is discussed in Chapter Three. The Ormonde sequence of Chan responds to my interrogation of the Windrush creatively, by reconstructing the 1947 voyage of its predecessor, the Ormonde. The remaining sections are thematically linked by their engagement with suppressed or unknown histories, writing from personal and public archives and their exploration of migration, diaspora and mixed-race identities.