The Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) is a 16-hectare urban renewal redevelopment project of the Queensland Department of Housing and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Over the last century, the land has housed military and educational institutions that have shaped Brisbane and Queensland. These groups each have their own history. Collectively their stories represented an opportunity to build a multi-art form public history project, consisting of a creative non-fiction historical manuscript and a collection of digital stories (employing oral history and digital storytelling techniques in particular) to construct a personal sense of place, identity and history. This exegesis examines the processes used and difficulties faced by the writer/producer of the public history; including consideration of the artistic selection involved, and consequent assembly of the material. The research findings clearly show that: giving contributors access to the technology required to produce their own digital stories in a public history does not automatically equate to total participatory inclusion; the writer/producer can work with the public as an active, collaborative team to produce shared historically significant works for the public they represent; and the role of the public historian is that of a valuable broker--in actively seeking to maximize inclusiveness of vulnerable members of the community and by producing a selection of multi-art form works with the public that includes new media.

Drawing on a diverse collection of both published and unpublished First World War diaries and letters, this thesis investigates the role of composition in war, examining the ways in which the act of writing itself - imposing narrative order on chaotic experience - functions in creating, securing, and repairing one's multiple identities in war. Indeed, through narration, the individual can connect to, challenge, or reconfigure, the war's prescribed social scripts - of soldier, nurse, spouse, parent, and/or patriotic citizen. This process or writing, and thereby re-asserting, one's identity was a fundamental component of men and women's emotional survival. In the midst of the First World War's chaos, life-writing held heightened significance on both home and battlefront. The diary and letter were appropriate generic vehicles through which men and women could express and negotiate the new facets and fragments of self; they were also sites where different social scripts could be tried and rehearsed, and venues for the navigation of war's trauma, suffering, and grief. Through the act of writing, the individual imposes some level of control over this otherwise chaotic experience. The 'I' on the page - whatever the length or descriptive quality of the words that surround it - is an assertion of the individual in a culture of sweeping propagandist claims, mass movement, and mass death. By putting pen to paper, the newly enlisted man could attempt to navigate the seemingly rapid transition from ordinary civilian to heroic soldier; the home front mother could confess fears and frustrations on the diary page, in turn mitigating grief and navigating the sense of self - as mother, as wife, as patriotic citizen - in the face of loss; from his trench, the frontline combatant could find distraction and escape through writing a letter home. The civilian man, in turn, could seek refuge in the diary's pages - his search to secure and validate alternate forms of ‘manliness' often being particularly fraught.

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Language itself is a technology, and the advent of each major technology of language transmission (from the alphabet to the printing press to the Internet) has changed the range of speaker-audience dynamics which are the starting point for all creative writing. In this thesis, a writer, armed only with his blog archives and a smattering of John Tenniel illustrations, guides the curious reader through various issues raised by creative writing in the blog form. Topics discussed include self-presentation, the juxtaposed brevity and expansiveness of online texts, nonlinear reading, alternative models for revision, the literary possibilities of the hyperlink, speaker-audience-time relationships in online settings, the future of ephemerality, the possibility of digital street theatre, and croquet with live balls and sticks. Also discussed are: the end of the world, the Partition of India, the political ramifications of labels replacing folders, my great-aunt's death, Wynton Marsalis, Jewish Vikings, democracy in Kahanistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, Elvis Costello, Sheikh Hasina, and the virtues of walking to church. This thesis also contains several introductions, an acknowledgements page, and more chapters than I care to count. A five-dollar bill may or may not be hidden between the digital pages of this thesis.

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This study examines the constructions and uses of the figure of Ovid in French writing of the second half of the seventeenth century, and explores how they were modulated by contemporary aesthetic and cultural concerns. As the influence of Ovid’s poetry made itself felt in various ways – in the mythopoeia of the Sun-King and the fashionable galant salons – interest in the story of Ovid’s life blossomed. This, I argue, was facilitated by new forms of ‘life-writing’, the nouvelle historique and histoire galante, and fuelled in unexpected ways by the escalating querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Research has been done on the reception and influence of Ovid’s poetry in this period, but little attention has been paid to the figure of Ovid. This thesis offers a new perspective and, informed by recent renewed interest in life-writing, argues that analysis of biographical depictions is vital for establishing a coherent picture of the uses of Ovid in the ‘Grand Siècle’. I explore a diverse range of textual descriptions of Ovid (Vies; prefatory material attached to translations and editions of his work; correspondence; dialogues des morts; biographical dictionaries and historical novels), organized according to their different, though intersecting, ways of writing about this poet. He was constructed as a historical figure, an author, a fictional character and a ‘parallèle’ – a point of identification or contrast for contemporary writers. Through close analysis of a multi-authored corpus, this thesis identifies and examines two instances of paradox: though an ancient poet, Ovid became emblematic of 'Moderne' movements and was used to explore aspects of galanterie; and, though his creative work was mobilized in the service of royal propaganda, Ovid, as a figure for the exiled poet, was also used to express anxieties about the sway of power and the machinations and pitfalls of the world of the court.

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