This thesis examines the gendered and racialised representations of social spaces in apartheid and post-apartheid writing. My research methodology incorporates a variety of literary and culture theories, including postcolonial theory, feminism and anthropology. I begin with a reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, examining the problematic paradigms of race and gender relations in post-apartheid South Africa which Coetzee represents through rape. Of particular importance is the idea of liminality and in the introduction I establish my interpretation of liminality amongst other theorists. I contend that the very fruitfulness of liminality as an analytical tool lies in its prismatic qualities that give rise to multiple possibilities of meaning. The complex nuances of liminality’s ‘betwixt and betweenness’ and its ‘undefinability’ are conducive to an examination of violence and violation. Simultaneously, however, liminality is also conducive to an examination of communitas or productive social relations predicated on a deep-rooted sense of shared experience. Informed by the analysis of Disgrace and the discussion of liminality in the introduction, each of the three main chapters focuses on a different thematic space. Starting with a discussion of Ruth First’s 117 Days, chapter 2 examines how the prison is a site of deactivation and conversely of collective revolutionary consciousness. I explore how Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Kagiso Lesego Molope’s Dancing in the Dust and Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, represent prison as a rite of passage. I also investigate how Antjie Krog in Country of my Skull, Caesarina Kona Makhoere in No Child’s Play and Lauretta Ngcobo in And They Didn’t Die contest deactivation. Chapter 3 considers urban spaces in terms of liminality in Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die. This chapter also discusses the potential for anti-apartheid protest in Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood and Molope’s Dancing in the Dust and the liminality of post-apartheid urban landscapes in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit and Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. Finally, analysing the train as a site of mobile incarceration in Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, chapter 4 also considers the varied representations of the train in To Every Birth Its Blood and Third World Express by Serote, Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, Molope’s Dancing in the Dust, ‘Home Sweet Home’ by Zoё Wicomb and other short stories by Miriam Tlali.

This study explores perceptions of Chinese texts by Western audiences while looking into the interrelation between film and literature. This is done by two means: firstly, through a detailed discussion of film adaptations with the focus on Chinese cinema, and secondly, through a practical demonstration of a filmic style in prose fiction in the form of an original book-length piece of fiction. Using Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ as the point of departure, the research on adaptations adopts an intertextual approach of adaptation theory as developed by Robert Stam, looking into the intertextual relationship between a hypotext (a source text) and a hypertext (film adaptation). The analysis of Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou (1991) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee (2001) concludes that both films contain elements of familiarity and strangeness for Western audiences, an uneasy mix of intimacy and exoticism which underpins their appeal. However, this phenomenon is unintended by the filmmakers themselves, chiefly because, firstly, the directors’ exposure to Western film art has contributed to the use of techniques that are familiar to Western audiences in the making of their films, and, secondly, the elements of strangeness are related to the natures of the films, the cultural elements involved and the locations in which the films are made, which are unfamiliar to a Western audience. The writing of the novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes, reveals the necessity of incorporating cultural elements into a narrative that is set in a time and place where the culture is deeply rooted. My background as a fourth-generation Chinese in Malaysia informs my urge as an artist and critic to explore aspects of my own cultural identity. The main concern, which is the key discovery of this experiment, is that once a writer understands the shared creative mechanism between film and literature, he can place a camera before his pages to capture the scenes he carefully arranged, making the page a screen onto which images as well as words can be projected.

This thesis presents a critical reading of selected Indo-Caribbean prose and poetry and explores their shared concern with issues of madness and insanity. Before approaching literary texts, however, the thesis investigates the colonial treatment of mental illness in Trinidad and British Guiana in order to establish a pragmatic link between the East Indians’ experience of mental illness during indentureship and its later emergence in literature. The study of the development of local colonial psychiatry is based on the examination of original sources, including relevant Parliamentary Papers and previously unexamined material. A critical reading of Edward Jenkins’s writings provides the link between history and literature, whilst contemporary theories on the construction of the collective imaginary help to sustain the argument of a transference of the trope of madness from facts to fiction, from reality to imagination. This project contributes both to the growing field of Indo-Caribbean literary criticism and to the embryonic area of the history of mental health in the Caribbean. Concentrating on the relation between the social history of medicine and literary imagination it suggests a new approach to Indo-Caribbean literature based on the close relationship between health and culture.

The main purpose of this thesis is to trace the impact of the English Romantic poets, especially Keats, Shelley and Byron, on Arab/Iraqi Romantic poetry and thought, in particular that of Nazik al-Mala'ikah. The thesis is divided into two volumes. The first volume consists of three chapters, each divided into short sections. The first chapter is a detailed introduction to the three other chapters. It discusses the problem of defining the term 'Romanticism'. It studies comparatively the four fundamentals of the English and Arabic Romantic theories. It traces the origin and the development of Arabic/Iraqi Romanticism. It also traces the sources of Nazik's knowledge of world literature: Arabic, English, American, French, German, Greek, Latin and Scandinavian. Nazik's poems and those of other Arabic Romantic poets, such as Iliyya Abu Madi, Ali Mahmud Taha, and Abu 'l-Qasim 'l-Shabbi are compared. The importance of the poems that appear in The Golden Treasury to Arabic poetry in general and to Nazik's poetry in particular is highlighted. A list of English poets, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron, whose poems and thoughts are influential on Nazik's poetry and critical works, is arranged chronologically with a short introduction to each poet, and his posit ion in Arabic/Iraqi poetry in general and in Nazik's literary works in particular. Abdul-Hai's bibliography of the Arabic versions of English poetry and Jlhan's Ra'uf's bibliography of the Arabic versions of Shelley's poetry are given, in order to indicate the earliest possible date of Arabic translation from English poetry. The second chapter is divided into two parts. These parts are preceded by a short introduction on Arabic translation of English poetry, followed by a section on Nazik's motives in translating English poetry. In the first part, Arabic versions of Gray's Elegy by Andraus, Mahmud, al-Muttalibi and Nazik are analysed comparatively to establish whether Nazik's version is original or dependent on the other earlier Arabic versions. In the final section, the influence of Gray's Elegy on Nazik's themes and imagery is traced. In the second part of this chapter, Nazik's version of Byron's address to the ocean in the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is fully analysed, preceded by a list of Arabic versions of Byron's poems. Nazik's version is studied independently from other Arabic versions, because most of the versions found are of different parts of Byron's poem. A section is devoted to Nazik's and Byron's relationship with the sea. In the last section, the impact of this passage on Nazik's poetry is traced and compared to that of Gray's Elegy. The third chapter traces the presence of Keats's odes in Nazik's poetry. This chapter is introduced by a definition of the term 'Ode'. The second section traces the impact of the themes and imagery of Keats's odes on Nazik' s poetry. Four sections are devoted to establishing the common contrasting themes in Keats's and Nazik's poetry. The following sections are devoted to the natural elements common to the poetry of Nazik and Keats: the birds, the wind, the river, the sun and the moon. The final sections study comparatively Nazik's and Keats's common literary devices: Personification, Synaesthesia and Compound adjectives. The second volume consists of the fourth chapter, the tables and the bibliography. This chapter studies the allusions in Nazik's poetry, and traces their sources in Keats, Shelley, Byron and Anatole France. A section is devoted to names alluded to in Nazik's poetry. The significance of The Golden Bough in Arabic is highlighted in a separate section, followed by a section on Nazik's mythological themes and symbols. Two sections are devoted to the relations of the Jinniyyah to poetry and to god. The appearance and functions of Nazik's Jinniyyah are compared to those of similar figures in Anatole France and Shelley. Nazik's Jinniyyah is seen as the synthesis of a complex mythological tradition. Many examples are given to discuss her relations to: (1) male and female mythological, religious and cultural characters, such as: Adam, Cain, Abel, Prometheus, Christ, Muhammad, Paphnutius, Midas, Plutus, Eve, Thais, Adonis, Cupid, Narcissus, Nessus, Ares, Magdalen, Thais, Venus, Diana, Rabiah al-Adawiyyah, the Sleeping Beauty, Demeter, Rapunzel and Shahrazad; (2) supernatural creatures, such as: the serpent, the demon, the spider, the sirens, the giant fish, the ghosts and the ghoul; (3) mythological things, such as: the Labyrinth, Lethe, Eldorado, Pactolus and al-Kawthar. A section is devoted to the symbol of Gold in Nazik's and in English poetry. Nine tables are supplied, setting out the common mythological names that occur in Nazik's, Keats's, Shelley's and Byron's poetry. A bibliography of primary and secondary Arabic and English sources is given. This bibliography contains the works cited throughout and other relevant secondary sources. The former are marked with an asterisk.

This study looks at women's prose narrative representing four major Chinese communities during the last 30 years, and focuses on the depiction of mother-daughter relationships among personae within the narrative texts. The thesis seeks to suggest that mother-daughter relationships within the texts are a reflection of how a text responds to its mother culture in the course of development. Narrative prose ranging from self-professed autobiographies to the fictional, written by Chinese women from American-Chinese communities, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China, are examined in a comparative approach within an ethnical framework. The concept of a national literature is discussed with regard to different fonns of Chinese-ness. It is revealed, in the course of this examination, that each group of Chinese women's writing examined here demonstrates an acute awareness of a link with an original mother culture, the Chinese orientation. However, recent events both inside and outside China have inevitably shaped cultural development in these communities, resulting in splits and diversifications in the individual cultural consciousness. Approached from this perspective, the Chinese mother culture gains a new vitality by virtue of shedding the burden of a long history. Focusing on the intertextual activities of regional writings, it is shown that represented Chinese-ness is no longer an unchanged and unchanging phenomenon, but is redefined each moment through the locus of interactions among independent hybrid communities.

The thesis proposes to address how the tradition of translating Chinese poetry in the English speaking world developed in the early twentieth century and has continued. Problems relating to this issue, such as the great change in poetics and intellectual atmosphere since 1915 when Cathay appeared, its impact on the translation of Chinese poetry, and the universe of discourse of the two cultures involved, those of the Chinese and the English speaking world, as well as the constraints of the target system on the translations, will also be discussed. The introduction provides an overview of the poetics that valued traditional metres at the turn of the century, and applies polysystem theory to explain the lack of enthusiasm for translations of classical Chinese poetry before 1915. Chapter 2 discusses the constraints of language, the poetics and universe of discourse in the target system, suggesting that these constraints handicapped the widespread transfer of classical Chinese poetry before 1915. Chapter 3 examines xing, the poetic device in Chinese poetry that emphasizes the poet's spontaneous response to nature and the merging of scene and feeling. The very nature of xing defies any attempt to make it explicit. The chapter is divided into two parts, discussing xing in the encoding and decoding process respectively. Readerresponse criticism and phenomenology are also incorporated in the discussions. The chapter is followed by an analysis of various attempts to translate poems that are presented with zing in Chapter 4, which shows that there is a tendency on the part of some translators to add logical links between the scene and the feelings expressed. Chapter 5 looks at the translation strategies of Arthur Waley, investigating the traditions of translating classical Chinese poetry that he has helped to build up. The kind of smooth grammatical lines he uses and the Chineseness he conveys have had great influence on subsequent translators. Chapter 6 studies Ezra Pound, with special focus on his innovative work Cathay, and his juxtaposition techniques. Chapter 7 studies Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Du Fu, while Chapter 8 examines Gary Snyder's translations of Cold Mountain. The vehicle of translating Chinese poetry in general-- language and poetics-- was close to that of modern poetry in the target culture. Chapter 9, the conclusion, asserts that various strategies are adopted for various purposes. It tries to place the position of the translators discussed in a polysystem context. In the target system, poems are appreciated more for their charm than their being supposedly faithful to an original. The image of China created through translators remains distant. To the reader in the West, China is always far out "there," not here.

This thesis was motivated by Robert Chard's puzzlement over the translational phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West. It proposes to address how the translational migration of martial arts fiction took place, first to other Asian countries in the 1920's, but to the West only after a lapse of a few decades beginning in the early 1990's. Adopting a descriptive approach as described by Gideon Toury, the thesis is intended to add further to the limited inventory of case studies in urgent demand to test the polysystem theory propounded by Even-Zohar. The thesis is made up of two parts. Part I is a macro-level study of martial arts fiction, intended to contribute to testing the limits of the polysystem theory. After examining Chinese fiction as a low form in the Chinese literary polysystem and its weak function as translated literature in the Western literary polysystem, the study explores the translational phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West as well as the concurrent phenomenon as to why so little of martial arts fiction has been translated into Western languages, compared to the copious amount into other Asian languages, to the extent of stimulating a new literary genre or (re)writing martial arts fiction in indigenous languages in Indonesia, Vietnam and Korea, sinicized countries or countries boasting large overseas Chinese communities. Issues and problems related to these translational activities and cultural phenomena are presented as tools to test the limits of the polysystem theory. Part II is a micro-level study focussing on the specifics of rendering Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain by Jin Yong into English. I will argue, in the main, that many difficulties, inherent in both the translating and reading processes, can be constructed within the theoretical framework of Andre Lefevere's concept of "constraint", particularly that of the universe of discourse. Lefevere's connotation of the universe of discourse will be expanded to embrace different cultural presuppositions and literary assumptions underlying two divergent world cultures, hence different reader expectations in the reading process. It is hoped that the findings and results of this descriptive case history of martial arts fiction as a literary genre in translational migrations will contribute to the accumulation of knowledge.

The development and use of languages for official, education, religion, etc. purposes have been a major political issue in many developing multilingual countries. A number of these countries, including China and India, have recognised the issues and developed language policies that have provided some ethnic groups with the right to develop their languages and cultures by using writing systems based on scripts suitable for these purposes. On the other hand, other countries, such as Ethiopia (a multilingual African state) had, for a long time, preferred a policy of one language and one script in the belief that this would help the assimilation of various ethnic groups create a homogenous population with one language and culture. Rather than realizing that aim, the policy became a significant source of conflict and demands for political independence among disfavoured groups. This thesis addresses the development of a writing system for Oromo, a language spoken by approximately 40 percent of the total population of Ethiopia, which remained officially unwritten until the early 1990s. It begins by reviewing the early history of Oromo writing and discusses the Ethiopian language policies, analysing materials written in various scripts and certain writers starting from the 19th century. The adoption of Roman script for Oromo writing and the debates that followed are explored, with an examination of some phonological aspects of the Oromo language and the implications of representing them using the Roman alphabet. This thesis argues that the Oromo language has thrived during the past few years having implemented a Roman-based alphabetical script. There have been and continue to be, however, internal and external challenges confronting the development of the Oromo writing system which need to be carefully considered and addressed by stakeholders, primarily by the Oromo people and the Ethiopian government, in order for the Oromo language to establish itself as a fully codified language in the modern nation-state.

Kí is a special genre in Vietnamese literature which embraces many subgenres of nonfiction which are classified in Western literature under such headings as diary, memoir, travelogue, biography, autobiography, and reportage. Within the twentieth century, kí has experienced many ups and downs before, during and after the Vietnam War. In this dissertation, from the angle of cultural studies which see genres both as historical products and a representation of subjectivity which resists to the assimilation of collective memory, I will investigate the theory and production of kí in the twentieth–century Vietnamese literature in order to find out the hidden mechanism which control the up and down and the variation of kí. The theory and practice of kí in North Vietnam since 1945 to the 1986 Reform, and the performance of kí in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, as well as the return of kí to be a democratic genre in North Vietnam after the 1986 Reform, will be investigated to clarify how a genre, as a historical product, reacts to different rhetorical strategies in different historical situations.

Over the past few decades, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has come into existence as a further development of the communicative approach. There have been some theoretical arguments over the merits of TBLT, and TBLT has taken a variety of different forms. However, a number of empirical studies confirm the feasibility of TBLT under appropriate conditions, and demonstrate its pedagogic effectiveness in ESP settings. To date, there has been no application of TBLT in professional communication courses in English for health science students in Thailand. This thesis investigated the potential of TBLT in this setting, to address a number of known problems with the development of spoken English within ESP in Thai higher education. This study was designed as a teaching intervention, conducted with a group of health science students. An action research design was followed, and both qualitative and quantitative data were obtained in the current study concerning the instructional process, ongoing student learning, and final learning outcomes. Thirty-one second year nursing students from School of Nursing, University of Northern Thailand (a pseudonym), participated in this study. All students attended a 12-week TBLT in Professional English course designed and taught by the researcher, and the central feature of the course was the requirement for students to perform oral role-play tasks over twelve weeks. Data were collected via (1) pre-and post-listening comprehension tests, (2) pre-and post-role play tasks, (3) longitudinal student case studies (4) repeated in-sessional questionnaires, (5) a post-sessional questionnaire, (6) an in-sessional group interview, and (7) teacher journal. The results from the pre- and post-listening comprehension tests and pre-and post-role play tasks showed that the students significantly increased their listening comprehension scores and used more communication skills in the interaction between nurses and patient in the post-role play. The case study results also indicate that individual students increased their use of communication skills, grammatical structures and lexical variety over time, as well as being more confident and adventurous with spoken language use. The positive outcomes of professional TBLT were supported by the findings of the in-sessional questionnaire, post-sessional questionnaire, in-sessional group interviews and teacher journal, which demonstrated very positive opinions towards the implementation of professional TBLT. Implications are drawn and recommendations made for further research and development to promote the fuller application of TBLT in ESP settings.