Discussions of British travel to Greece in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the work of Lord Byron. Byron’s contemporary Greeks were Orientalised, while antique Greece was personified as a captive Greek woman on the brink of compromise by the Ottomans, or a cadaver. Throughout the nineteenth century this antique vista was employed by the tourist industry. This thesis offers a consideration of the visions and vistas of Greece encountered by British women who travelled to Greece in the subsequent years, especially in the light of how commercial tourism limited or constructed their access to Greece. Commercial tourist structures were in place in Athens and other major sites of antiquity, but the majority of the women considered here travelled through a terrain that went beyond a narrow and museum staged experience of Greece. Three paradigms have been established for women travelling in Greece: the professional archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the tourist. The women archaeologist combated the patriarchal domination of the classics, not only to posit a female intellectual who could master Greece, but also reveal how antique Greece was used to underwrite patriarchal British ideologies. The ethnographers in Greece are a mixed collection of semi-professional and professional ethnographers, considered alongside more conventional travel narratives, all of which offer discussions of the modern Greek psyche trapped at a series of liminal fissures (East/West, antique/modern). Concentrating on women and geography, they subtly conflate the two to read nation in gender. However, without the sexualised aspect of their male counterparts, they read Greek women through a series of diverse practices that they identify through a close contact that could only be established between women. The modern tourist in Greece offers the most enduring and lasting type of traveller in Greece. Travelling with and against guidebooks, the discussion considers the visual technologies that helped to codify the way Greece is still seen as a tourist destination. In conjunction with this, the popular discourses denigrating women’s travel are also discussed, which offers a key reason for the dismissal of their literary output.

Consumer participation in the production of information, knowledge and culture has become increasingly popular in the last three decades. Although these participatory practices have been successfully incorporated into business models in many sectors, media and entertainment industries are still quite reluctant to invite audiences to create canonical content for their storyworlds. Media conglomerates hold a firm grip over their intellectual property and only allow selected parties to participate in the production of official content for their franchises. In contrast, participatory worlds are fictional worlds which allow audiences to contribute with canonical additions to their expansion. In participatory worlds, audience members are welcome to contribute to the content production chain and/or decision-making processes, having the chance to become contributors and co-authors of the texts. This thesis critically examines participatory worlds with the aim of understanding what they are and how they operate within the industrial context. This research introduces two models of participatory worlds, the ‘sandpit’ and ‘spin-off’ models, based on the location and medium where audience participation takes place, primary or ancillary works, and uses one case study to illustrate each of these: the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Lord of the Craft (2011- ) and Grantville Gazette (2003- ), an e-zine rooted in the 1632 Universe. These case studies are compared with commodities produced and systems employed by media conglomerates in the management and canonical expansion of their fictional worlds in order to establish similarities and differences among them and determine where participatory worlds stand in respect to the media and entertainment industries. The concept of ‘intervention’ is introduced to define the capabilities that audience members are given to contribute canonically and make an impact in a storyworld. This thesis explores the factors which determine the degree of ‘intervention’ given to participants in participatory worlds by examining two further case studies, the web drama Beckinfield (2010-2013) and the TV show Bar Karma (2011), in addition to the aforementioned. The comparison of the four case studies reveals different approaches to audience participation within these practices.

As the game of England and empire, cricket is a significant colonial and postcolonial cultural practice which has proven as important to anti colonial modes of resistance, opposition and independence as its image of Englishness was to the hegemonizing project of British imperialism. Although the game has an immense literature of its own, little critical attention has been paid to its place in the field of literary studies. Consequently, taking its title and starting point from the interwoven questioning of Rudyard Kipling and C. L. R. James, this thesis explores cricket's repeated presence in English and Caribbean literature as a symbol of interconnected national and imperial identities under constant renegotiation, concentrating specifically on the construction and problematization of the male cricket hero - real and/or fictional - from Tom Brown to Brian Lara. Organized around the territorial metaphor of the crease, Part One, `English Literature at the Imperial Crease 1850s-1950s', offers two chapters which examine the place of cricket in the creation, imperial contextualization and post war decline of the English cricketing gentleman as a hero of the nation. Part Two, `Caribbean Heroes at the Literary Crease after 1950', engages with cricket's relation to the masculine quest for independence in Trinidadian literature as well as a range of poetic representations of the Caribbean's substantial investment in cricket heroes. Finally, Part Three, `The Straight White Line', re-evokes the crease as line and territory to read the trans-gendered British Caribbean cricketing body of Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). The thesis argues that while cricket has been a valuable vehicle for the postcolonial expression of freedom in the Caribbean and elsewhere it has also remained tied to an over investment in individual male heroes which continues to pose substantial problems to projects of collective emancipation.

The purpose of the study has been to investigate the collaboration between the leisure center and the school library and what obstacles and opportunities there are. In my dissertation, I have interviewed a school librarian and a leisure educator to find out how they work with literature in school and what obstacles and opportunities they believe there are to increase collaboration between school and school library. I have also used previous research that shows the effects of reading for children at an early age and current studies that show the negative effects that come from the use of school libraries to an increasing extent in Sweden. The results of the study have shown that reading from an early age has a great impact on children's schooling and their opportunities to acquire information and knowledge throughout their lives. The school can make a big difference for the students by offering a large selection of literature and adapting the reading so that all students have the opportunity to read on their own terms. By having a school library with trained staff, students get the best conditions for qualitative and rewarding reading.

Based on Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, this thesis gives an interpretation of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Published in 1899, the Theory proposes a sociological analysis of the economical and social American elite, from 1850 to 1900, a time of major capitalistic expansion in the United States. Veblen's concepts of leisure and conspicuous consumption allow us to demonstrate how each character in Proust's novel distinguishes itself in a context of social rivalry. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu's theory, various conspicuous social practices are analyzed according to the social milieu of La Recherche from which they originated. Therefore, Mme Verdurin's upper middle class perception of reality confronts the aristocratic ethic embodied by the duchesse de Guermantes. In the conclusion of the thesis, we acknowledge the predominant sociological aspect of La Recherche, which is however only one of the many underlying elements of Proust's technique of fiction.

No description available.

No description available.