Translation is not simply a transmission from one language to another language, but the bridge connecting languages, cultures, and people around the world throughout history, from past to present, in time and space. In the mutual relationship with literary systems, translation in some cases is the pioneer orienting domestic literature from stylistics, genres to content. Translation in Viet Nam, however, has never been studied systematically, and at present is like a chaotic market in which the rhythm of three main factors, translation, proof-reading, and criticism are marching to different tunes. The thesis focuses on evaluating the functions and contributions of translation in the development of literature and society in Vietnam. Besides, the thesis uses Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a case study to clarify problems in translation in Vietnam. The results synthesized from the formulation of research questions have revealed that translation in Vietnam is absolutely a great transformer of culture and a fertilizer of Vietnamese literature. The case study Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has pointed out that present problems of translation in Vietnam are the shortage of criticism which consequently produces many poor quality translations called ‘disasters’, and of classic books for high education and research. Within deep analysis into the sematic features of the Vietnamese translation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in comparison to its Shakespeare’s English, the thesis has concluded that this translation, which has been used popularly in schools over fifty years, is no longer suitable for present audiences. It is, therefore, encouraged to re-translate the text. The thesis besides providing a whole picture of translation in Vietnam and insights into the practice of translating Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into Vietnamese, is a valuable source for Vietnamese translation scholars to indicate strategies for the development of translation in Vietnam, and for Vietnamese translators to re-translate not only other plays of Shakespeare but also classical works of the world.

The focus of this dissertation is the representation of the artist as a character in British theatre. In this study, which includes three chapters and one introductory chapter, I attempt to show that British playwrights, whether male or female, use their main fictional characters as artists either for self-reflexivity or to comment on the situation of being an artist. In accordance with the above premise, the responsibility of the artist and the function of art is investigated with due reference to radical thinkers, philosophers and writers such as, among others, Immanuel Kant, Oscar Wilde, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Viktor Shklovsky, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre. This investigation concentrates on the conceptualization and contribution of those intellectuals to the definition of the role of the artist. Though I focus mainly on the period from the 1970s to the 2000s onwards, by analysing the dramatic texts of three British playwrights: Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, and Timberlake Wertenbaker, I also discuss the decade following John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). In this manner, I trace the key changes that have taken place in British theatre during the second half of the 20th century. Though there is an abundance of critical material on the subject which focuses on the figure of the artist to show self-referral for the dramatist, the present thesis goes beyond that to highlight the role and responsibility of the artist in British theatre, the function of art, the potential dilemmas he or she may confront and the economic and political circumstances surrounding them. The plays examined in this thesis range from those depicting the problematic role of the artist as an intellectual, who is torn between morality and immorality, as in Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) and Travesties (1974), to those which reject the utilitarian function of art, for example Barker’s No End of Blame: Scenes of Overcoming (1981) and Scenes from an Execution (1984). In the case of Wertenbaker, I highlight the role and dilemmas of female artists as they use theatre as a means to show the hegemonic political and economic constraints imposed on their artistic creativity. By analysing several of Wertenbaker’s plays which centre on the use of the artist as a character, her Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) and The Line (2009), reflect the relationship between male and female artists and the dilemmas they faced. This thesis poses the following questions: as a fictional character, how can the artist function as a member of a certain community whilst at the same time retain the distinctiveness of his or her role as an outsider? Is he or she committed to the creative work or to the social usefulness of society? If so, can we expect art or the artist to have the answer to society’s problems? Or is that an overly high expectation to place on the artist? How did artists feel living in a society under censorship? How can they avoid being censored? And if they failed, what is the price of free expression? Springing from the discussion about the dilemmas of the artist in British theatre, it will become apparent how these dilemmas, represented by fictional characters, bring forth the dominant plays about artists. Within the framework of the above mentioned playwrights, it is demonstrated that the pressing dilemma which radical artists are faced with nowadays are multiple: social, commercial and political.

Opinions about Synge's work vary from redundant noise to van-guardist art, or the embodiment of the spirit of the Nation. The literary mask created by Yeats and the disparaging caricature his opponents publicised, have barred access to the unbiased study of his work documents. Synge's plays changed the course of the emerging National Theatre. Yeats's plays were attacked for not serving well enough the nationalist cause, but Synge's were seen by nationalists as working completely on the other side of the fence. This argument and the poetical fallacy of Synge's political inactivity are here reappraised. For the nationalists both his witting silence and his social and family background caused aggravation which found opportunity to be voiced at each production of his plays. What still disturbs in the plays is the interaction between individuals and social groups. The exchanges between characters, the progress or stasis of individual characters through the play, the continual change of perspective forced on the audience, these are the features that still strike a controversial note today. Synge is here seen as a "colonizer who refuses" as he frees himself from family strict rule. The first two chapters analyse the historical and personal evolution towards a native Irish Theatre in English. The following chapters study the process by which each play diverts the expectations it arouses in the audience, following the genesis of each play through its source material when possible, to see how some controversial images and dialogues were arrived at, where they acquired their polemic weight. This part of the study focuses on the writing methods of Synge, and the "reading formation” of the public. The grotesque style of the plays and prose is found to be similar in tone to the Rabelaisian grotesque: both share the hope of regeneration in life's forces and nature, as opposed to a strict Christianity. Synge's use of grotesque shattered aesthetic and philosophical expectations in his intellectual audience, causing the anger among the nationalists and the literary coterie. The particular depiction of women's roles in his plays are compared with Victorian and modern patterns of female behaviour. In the plays Nature is seen not as the bucolic "locus" for philosophical self-contemplation, but as nurturer and threat for its original dwellers. The knowledge of and closeness to the forces of Nature elicit respect for outsiders as possessing a valuable culture, either in isolation or organised in marginal societies. The outcasts in Irish society are given an articulate voice in Synge's plays: beggars, vagrants, tinkers, the blind and women. In all plays strong female characters assert themselves in unorthodox ways, defying custom and legend. The use of legend in his last play shows Synge as heralding the end of a mythologising era, presenting legendary events issuing not from fate but personal heroic decision, that of a woman who choses her life and death, following her own values.

This complex practice as research project was designed to interrogate the potential of 'Traumaturgy', an emergent dramaturgical methodology, in addressing the many challenges of writing, staging, and performing, autobiographical trauma narratives and to understand the impact of this process on the psychic, and somatic memories, of the autobiographical performer. The methodology was designed to motivate complex reflections on personal and cultural traumata as critical provocations for the re-writing and performing of the memory-scripts associated with the autobiographical traumatic life events such as adoption, which are explored through the traumaturgical performance process. Rather than distracting the psyche from the autobiographical traumatic experience, the traumaturgy model functions by seeking to establish new internal cognitive networks: positive associations that might facilitate an empowering, liberating transition, initiated through the act of traumaturgically framed narrative performance. Models of trauma intervention locate narrative reconstructions of the traumatic experience as a central focus for the process of recovery (Eagle., 2000; Herman, 1992; Schwartz & Prout, 1991) etc, however, unlike expressive therapies (see Glading, 1991; Moreno, 1975) which exist within the relative safety of the applied theatre space, key to this methodology is the achievement of strategic closure, by returning the performance to the traditional theatre environment and inviting an audience to play the role of witness. This creative synthesis between trauma theory and dramaturgical responses to the staging, and performing of post-traumatic memory based materials, forms the axis of this methodological approach. The research-sharing event In Search of Duende, which represented the performative articulation of this thesis, culminated in the performance of the play Dancing For Franco, which sought to re-write, and re process the researcher’s autobiographical trauma-based memory scripts through its witnessed performance. The play takes the somatic language of flamenco intertwoven with the adoption narratives of the researcher, and individuals affected by the Francoist system of illegal baby theft which are collectively known as the Niños Robados (Spain’s Stolen Children), and the fictional narratives of created characters, to understand how the traumaturgy model might instigate transformational processes within the autobiographical performer.

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This thesis investigates the leading popular theatres in central Manchester between the years 1880-1903. It was a time of rapid change that saw the rise of mass entertainment in which the theatres and music halls played a major part. This is a study of theatre as industry rather than the content of what could be seen on its stages. These developments are discussed as part of a nascent night time cultural economy being driven by the comparative rise in wages and reduction of working hours of the urban workforce. With the power to choose how to spend their disposable income and how to use their leisure time, the growing working and lower middle classes as consumers could exercise influence over the purveyors of commercial entertainment and demand what they wanted to see. The series of case studies investigate the networks of sociability that emerged and operated in and between the managements of the theatres and connected them with the rising press. Theatre, and specifically pantomime, is seen at the centre of a series of interlocking narratives that connected the industrial city, rational recreation, the ‘bohemian’ network of socialist writers and artists and audiences in late nineteenth century Manchester.

This thesis examines the twenty-first-century intercultural performance of Shakespeare in Kerala, India. The thesis highlights Shakespeare’s function in invigorating local performing arts traditions that navigate tensions between paradigms of former feudalism, post-Independence democracy and capitalist globalisation. Throughout, individual artistic perspectives in interview illustrate local productions of \(Macbeth\) for indigenous Keralan performing art forms, ranging from the two-thousand-year old kutiyattam to contemporary postmodern Malayalam-language drama. My introduction contextualises these hybrid productions in their global, national, and local historiography, exploring intersections of the sacred, supernatural, and secular; postmodernism and rasa theory; intercultural Shakespeares and Keralan performing arts; and Shakespearean works with Indian literary and theatrical traditions from the colonial to the postmillennial era. Chapter One highlights cultural translation, focusing on kutiyattam artist Margi Madhu’s 2011 \(Macbeth\); Chapter Two discusses cultural collaboration, studying kathakali artist Ettumanoor P. Kannan’s \(Macbeth\) \(Cholliyattam\), 2013; Chapter Three considers cultural fusion, profiling Abhinaya Theatre’s experimental local-language production of \(Macbeth\), 2011. In closing, the thesis underscores the importance of giving a voice to Keralan theatre artists on Shakespeare, recognising the hitherto critically unexamined potential for the meeting point of two great dramatic cultural traditions as a forum, underpinned by residual colonial and Communist legacies, for intercultural discourse.

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This thesis examines written, audio-visual and musical representations of real-life British serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady (the ‘Moors Murderers’) and Peter Sutcliffe (the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’), from the time of their crimes to the present day, and their proliferation beyond the cases’ immediate historical‐legal context. Through the theoretical construct ‘Northientalism’ I interrogate such representations’ replication and engagement of stereotypes and anxieties accruing to the figure of the white working-class ‘Northern’ subject in these cases, within a broader context of pre‐existing historical trajectories and generic conventions of Northern and true crime representation. Interrogating changing perceptions of the cultural functions and meanings of murderers in late--‐capitalist socio--‐cultural history, I argue that the underlying structure of true crime is the counterbalance between the exceptional and the everyday, in service of which its second crucial structuring technique – the depiction of physical detail – operates. Applying the theories of David Schmid and Lisa Downing to a new range of figures and artefacts I demonstrate ways true crime can expose and explore the unequal power relations inherent in capitalism, both constructing the figure of the criminal as – and uncoupling that figure from a mythology that renders them – falsely ontologically separate from normalised forms of violence.

There is a conceptual resonance between the rhizomatic habit in the world of plants and the perennial errancy in the (meta)physical world of man traversed by Mohammed Dib’s writing. In so far as reflective research and the practice of translation can ‘mirror’ the surface of their object, this project is a rhizomatic endeavour. It is a fragmentary journey into the desert, in search of the mysterious at’lāl, the trace of the sign, drawn and effaced and redrawn again by Mohammed Dib to reveal ephemeral truths about the self and its others. Dib’s focus migrates from early realist ‘socio-ethnographic’ novels in the 1950s to metaphysical explorations described by critics as ‘hermetic’, ‘mystical’ or ‘surreal’. The historical and the mystical, however, are two facets of the same inexorable acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in a precarious, often oneiric, universe. The ‘visions’ expressed in his poetics are couched in the elemental vocabularies of light and shadow, fire and water, space and duration and draw their substance from Sufi mystical scholars and poets. I posit that Dib’s nomadic contemporary writing arises from the place that lies between the sensible and the intelligible in Sufi mysticism, in a secular transposition of the Sufi Imagination: Dib neither constructs nor deconstructs. Rather, his singular style serves to hone an acutely experiential expression. Further, there is a sense in which each ouvrage is a heterotrope whereby his poetry and prose collections are inextricably embedded in each other, thus one is always in the middle of his universe. The ubiquitous entry point to this universe lies in the middle of his metaphorical desert, an aesthetic landscape stripped of idiocultural signification. Central to its lines of flight is the sign, both ephemeral and enduring, and what is enveloped in the sign is the non-signifying impact of its expression. I argue that Dib’s perennial re-assembling of ‘ces chaînes aux mailles d’acier qui sont mots’ (those chains with links of steel that are words) doesn’t so much ‘give rise to thought’ as ‘give rise to affect’.