Includes bibliographical references. / This study of selected Old English texts, from the canons of Aelfric and Cynewulf, presents the argument that the primary purpose of the Saints' Lives in question is that of instruments of persuasion. After a description of the rites of Anglo-Saxon paganism, an attempt is made to outline the manner in which the Christian missionaries used certain aspects of pagan belief to promote Christianity. As such, these texts may therefore be viewed as religious propaganda in the Anglo- Saxon Church's attempt to win new converts to Christianity and to strengthen the faith of those already within its fold, firstly by promoting belief in the miraculous and secondly by investing Anglo-Saxon Christianity with the supernatural powers of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Pagan religions. Although the works of Cynewulf predate those of Aelfric, I have chosen to discuss the prose works of Aelfric first. However, I do not believe that reversing the historical order invalidates the argument.

Includes bibliography. / This study involves an examination of one particular Old French illuminated secular manuscript, nanlely MS Grey 4 c 12, a fourteenth century copy of the poem Le Roman de la Rose. It attempts to understand the relationship between its illumination and the written text and to describe the unique features of its miniatures and marginalia, as well as including a codicological description of the manuscript.

The study examines the character of Margaret Paston through a selective reading of Paston Letters and Papers of the fifteenth century. Consideration is given to the problems posed by the letter form, to the identification of an authentic "voice" in the letters of a woman who was probably unable to write, and to the constraints of an incomplete historical record. Margaret is viewed by means of her own words and her relationships with her immediate and extended family, and in the light of the social and political circumstances of the time. It is concluded that by examining Margaret in this way, there is sufficient material in the epistolary record to make an assessment of her character.

Bibliography: leaf 61. / What is a magical narrative? How can the inconsistencies and strange repetitions in the plots of Malory's Arthurian cycle be explained? What are their purposes and why are they essential to the plot? In this dissertation, I have attempted to answer these questions by applying Anne Wilson's theory of magical narrative (The magical quest) to a selection of tales from the beginning of Malory's Arthurian cycle (The tale of King Arthur) and from the latter half (The book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Quinevere).

This thesis demonstrates how literary and medical authors explored changing concepts of childbirth and reproductive medicine between the years 1737 and 1798. Considerable changes took place during this period that transformed birth from a social rite of passage into a medical event. Questions such as who and what was involved in reproduction, how childbirth was managed by individuals and communities, as well as how common understanding about these matters were reached, were brought to the fore in a way that they had never before been raised. A key means by which these ideas were communicated was through the rapidly developing print market with its overlapping interests in literature and medicine. Scholarship of medical humanities and medical history has grown exponentially in the last few decades, including that relating to the history of midwifery and the professionalization of what would become obstetric discourse, yet no study has brought together the theme of reproduction with trends in medical and literary publishing directly. The methodology employed here favours neither the literary nor historical, nor the feminist over the biographical, but rather brings these approaches together, drawing on medical theory of the period, trends in publishing, the rise of both women’s writing and the novel, as the texts considered require. The thesis widens the source pool consulted for purposes of developing a detailed understanding of the history of reproductive medicine. In doing so, the materials analysed reveal that both lay and professional authors found a range of creative ways of relating to changes in the medical management of pregnancy and childbirth, using personal stories and broader medical information, some of this illicit.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

This essay examines the ideology or value system implicit in Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter series. Many of the images in the series, despite being fantastic or empirically unprecedented, are minor transformations of popular books and of our very common physical and cultural reality. However, these imaginative transformations of mundane reality actually imitate, reiterate, and conserve common and contemporary secular values. On a third level the thesis will show that this conservation of contemporary secular values is undermined by a cynical and very subtle transformative element of satire, parody, and criticism. Depending on the theme explored by the particular chapter, a different level of meaning might be evident. Chapter One discusses Rowling's parody of popular secular values. Chapter Two focuses on her parody of Christianity. Chapter Three focuses on Rowling's representations of nature and technology and on her parodic reversal of their traditional representation in similar literature. Chapter Four discusses how Rowling has made a critical appropriation of popular culture's reliance on thoughtless and 'instant' solutions, and discusses how she has made a mockery of her own hero, Harry Potter. The conclusion discusses the value of literary devices that transform literal meanings and verbal images into new meanings and images, and concludes that Harry Potter should be read cautiously. A second conclusion is that the author's claim the series is incomplete is a hoax. This argument is defended with a demonstration that the existing four Harry Potter books form a complete unit, and with a reminder that an element of hoax pervades Rowling's entire series.

This study examines Lawrence's views of nature and their relations to perspectives drawn from Oriental traditions and philosophies. Many of Lawrence's non-Christian perspectives concerning the universe and man's relationship with nature bear strong affinities with Eastern thought systems, particularly his understanding of such fundamental matters as the enigma of nature, nature's duality and oneness, the mutual identity between man and nature, issues of god and evolution, mind and body, life and death, and sexuality, and concerns with intuition, spontaneity and primitivism. Lawrence met with hostility and prejudice from the literary world partly because some of his viewpoints were misread and misunderstood. However, they can be to a large degree explained and justified by traditional Oriental thought. In Lawrence's understanding of man's integrity and "living wholeness", we have his "indecent" proposition of sexuality, his "strange" assertion of blood consciousness and stress upon the solar plexus, his rejection of mind and intellect, and his preference for desire over ideology, and for primitivism over industrial materialism. These are views parallel to those of Taoism, though they also have their traces in the Western scientific readings which Lawrence was familiar with. Lawrence's transcendental attitude towards nature accounts for his extraordinary sensitivity to the natural world, and for his radical criticism of modern civilizations, sciences and the mechanical life, particularly in terms of financial motivation. The study of Lawrence's philosophy of nature suggests that Lawrence is an outstanding example of twentieth-century Romanticism. Furthermore, in Lawrence and in his work, we see a prominent figure in the development of a new environmental consciousness in literature.

Previous research has shown that the English article system poses a great challenge to second language learners of English. Thus, this current study aims at understanding the difficulties first year Libyan students have in acquiring the English article system by using the following three steps. First, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) was adopted to compare the article system in both English and Arabic. This procedure was employed in order to predict the difficulties that Libyan learners might be confronted by. Therefore, based on CAH, several difficulties were predicted. Moreover, because there are different opinions between researchers from the Arabic world and those from the west regarding the effect of L1 in the acquisition of grammatical items, this study tests what role L1 may play when L2 Libyan learners of English acquire the English article system. The second part aims to investigate the effectiveness of two kinds of article instruction: an implicit teaching strategy (i.e. textual enhanced input) and an explicit teaching strategy (deductive teaching) with an evaluation of the long-term effects. These teaching strategies were compared in order to: 1. Measure the effectiveness in using the English article system appropriately, 2. Measure grammatical development using t-unit, 3. Measure lexical diversity using TTR. The experiment was administrated to three groups of ESL first year students at Garyounis University in Libya. One group (TEI) received instructions based on an input enhancement strategy. In order to direct the learners’ attention to the target features, the researcher manipulated the learners’ input with the aim of provoking development by deliberately engaging awareness and trying to increase the learners’ attention. The second group (DT) was instructed based on the deductive teaching strategy. It was instructed in accordance with two popular grammar books, specifically ‘Essential Grammar in Use’ by Murphy (1998) and ‘Oxford Practice Grammar’ by Eastwood (1999). The third group, the (CG) served as the control group and received exposure to language through reading passages. The procedure of this group was similar to that of the (TEI) group, with the only difference being that the articles in the texts for this group were not enhanced. All three groups were given a similar article test three times as the pre- test, post- test 1 and post-test 2. The pre-test was given prior to the treatment so that the results of the test served to ascertain a baseline for all groups. Then, eight weeks later, after the treatment was finished, post-test 1 was immediately given, in order to measure proficiency gains; post-test 2 was given to the students six months later to distinguish the long term effects on the learning process. With regards to the effectiveness of using the English article appropriately, the results showed that group DT improved from pre-test to post-tests 1& 2. The scores that were above chance in post-test1 & 2 were better than those in the pre-test. In the TEI group, the scores which were above chance, slightly improved from pre-test to post-tests 1 & 2. For the CG group, the scores in post-test 1 which were above chance, improved slightly from pre-test and that the scores in post-test 2 reduced from those of the pre-test. The measurement of lexical diversity was undertaken using TTR. The results showed that both groups TEI and CG presented better results (i.e. development in students’ writing) than the DT group in post-test 1. In post-test 2, only the TEI group improved significantly. This result suggests that the TEI group remained unchanged after 6 months of instruction. The third part of this study analyzed and classified learners’ errors. It confirmed the types of errors predicted previously in chapter 3: omission of a/an/the, unnecessary insertion of a/an / the and confusion between a and an. The results revealed that the percentage of omission of a/an was higher than the omission of ‘the’, and that the percentage of unnecessary insertion of a/an/the was less than the omission of a/an/the.

This thesis was conducted to examine the adequacy of the skills and preparation of the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) English language teachers as the poor performance of Nigerian students in external English language examinations has become a source of concern to educational stakeholders (Patrick, Sui, Didam & Ojo, 2014). The NCE is the basic qualification for teaching in Nigeria. The concern for the quality of teachers in Nigeria is crucial as the Nigerian government recognized a problem with the training of teachers at the NCE level in 2010 and proposed to abolish the colleges and phase out the NCE (Idoko, 2010). The Context, Input, Process and Product (CIPP) Evaluation model is used as a theoretical framework in the study. The research questions were: What is the context of the English language programme of the Nigeria Certificate in Education? How does the implementation of the curriculum equip students to develop the four language skills? What are the lecturers and students’ perceptions of the implementation of the curriculum and how have the objectives of the curriculum been achieved? In examining these issues, a mixed methods approach was adopted within the framework of the CIPP model, while utilizing a case study. The study showed the ineffective implementation of the curriculum as a factor for the failure of Nigerian students in external English language examinations. The research established the deficiency of the students in the basic skills of the language. The process and product evaluations noted failures in the procedural design of the curriculum and demonstrated a lack of achievement of the objectives of the curriculum. The recommendations arising from the research emphasized an immediate review of the admission policy and an extensive involvement of the lecturers in the future reform of the curriculum. Future research is concerned with an investigation of the measures that will curb systemic failures in the colleges.