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This thesis investigates the textual culture of early modern Scotland, as evident from three literary miscellany manuscripts produced and circulated in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. Each of the main three chapters will consider one miscellany manuscript in its complex totality, dealing with questions of provenance, ownership, editorial history, literary analysis, and an assessment of the manuscript in its wider cultural context. Manuscript transcriptions are appended, particularly since the contents of two out of three of the miscellanies discussed here have never been printed. Chapter One, by way of introduction, considers the current state of manuscript research in Scotland, and the implications for Scottish studies of book-historical methodologies. ‘Histories of the Book’ are currently being written across Europe (and further afield), and Scotland forms no exception. Against this backdrop, Chapter One evaluates recent critical work on early modern Scottish textual culture, and the extent to which book-historical narratives, developed in relation to medieval and renaissance English literature, can be applied to Scottish writing. More specifically, this chapter locates the miscellany manuscript as a prime site of investigation for scribal culture. The first miscellany under investigation, in Chapter Two, is Edinburgh University Library MS Laing III.447. For the largest part, the content of this manuscript has been printed, as a supplementary volume to the works of Alexander Montgomerie. This print is problematic in many respects, however, since it reorganised the entire content, and removed from its immediate context the longest poem of the manuscript, Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae. The appended transcription restores the original order. Chapter Two will investigate the contributions of the many scribes that were responsible for the manuscript, and examine whether any thematic coherence may be detected. Chapter Three deals with Cambridge University Library MS Kk.5.30, a hybrid manuscript that contains two sections. Section one (dating to the late-fifteenth, early-sixteenth century) features a transcription of John Lydgate’s Middle English Troy Book; section two consists of a later supply (c. 1612) by James Murray of Tibbermuir, containing additions to the Troy Book and twenty-seven miscellaneous poems. Though this latter section will be the main focus of the chapter, the manuscript’s other section, and thus its hybridity, will not be ignored. The third and final miscellany to be discussed is National Library of Scotland MS 15937. Containing approximately 175 items (many of which from English sources), this is the most expansive of the three manuscripts considered here. MS 15937 is textually a problematic source, since it is a nineteenth-century transcript of a lost original, the latter compiled by Margaret Robertson of Lude around 1630. This miscellany is an important witness also in musical terms, since it collects the words to a significant amount of Scottish and English songs, many of them unique to the manuscript. All chapters will stress the highly idiosyncratic nature of the miscellanies, but also, where possible, establish common ground between them, and connect them to other Scottish and English manuscripts and printed books. In all their complexity, the miscellanies reveal a literary culture whose nature undermines the monolithic and court-centred history that has been so prevalent in literary criticism (though the court, and courtly writing, are important backgrounds to a great deal of the poetry contained in the manuscripts). Finally, as underlined in the concluding Chapter Five, EUL Laing III.447, CUL MS Kk.5.30, and NLS MS 15937 are important collections both for the preservation, and for evidence about the dissemination, of Scottish and English verse.

This thesis examines the relations between music and literature through fictional women musicians in nineteenth-century European literature and more particularly through their bodies. The female body appears to be a rich juncture between music and literature, facilitating musical references in literature as well as creating complex musical narrative systems anchored in social, cultural and scientific discourses of the long nineteenth century. All types of women musicians are examined (singers, instrumentalists, composers, and even listeners) along with different discourses on the body (social, philosophical and scientific), shedding a new light on gender and the arts. Our chronological as well as thematic approach strives to highlight a common representation of the body and of female musicians in literature. German Romantic texts thus present women musicians as elusive figures who play a key role in the impossibility to materialise the abstract. Realist and sensation novels are analysed through a clinical perspective on the body and envision female musicians as monomaniacs. On the contrary, fiction written by female authors introduces empowered musicians as priestess of art. Finally, fin-de-siècle novels stage the female body as a degenerate entity of society. The parallel analysis of literary case studies with different perspectives on the body posits the women-music-body triangle as a new approach to gender, music and literature.

My thesis focuses on a group of novels dealing with Indo-British interracial marriage, written at the turn of the 20th century. The novels belong to the large corpus of popular literature produced at this time about India by male and female Anglo-Indian writers whose purpose in writing was not only entertainment but also, importantly, instruction.¹ This literature has been neglected by the literary critics but repays close attention for it is a valuable archive for the study of female perspectives on British rule in India. There has been work by historians on Anglo-Indian women recently but the womens' own fictional writing has been largely neglected. Using a historical materialist approach, one of my aims in this study is also to examine the differences of perspective on British rule evident in male and female writing on India. The narrative trajectory is invariably the same: an ignorant British protagonist marries an Indian with whom s/he sets up home, prompted by desires which are gendered. The depiction of intimacy, I argue, is intended to illuminate the hidden space of Indian life (the home) so that marital and domestic practices which were considered to degrade Indian women may be exposed to the British reader. The link made by the British between the treatment of women and the fitness of Indian men for self-rule is important here. The representation of the Indian home as a hidden space about which the British knew very little but imagined much, offers a reading of the anxiety felt by the British about the limits of their control in India, both over the Indians and over themselves. ¹These writers include Alice Perrin, Maud Diver, Fanny Penny, E.W. Savi, Victoria Cross and Pamela Wynne; several male Anglo-Indian writers and non-Anglo-Indians are included.

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This thesis aims to investigate how works by Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean writers circulate in translation. The texts under study include allographic translations as well as cases of self-translation. Caribbean texts and their translations are analysed through the prism of the threshold, which offers a multi-faceted entry point into key themes and aspects of Caribbean literature as well as into translational strategies. When discovering the Caribbean in and through translation, readers experience the crossing of multiple thresholds, be they topographical, cultural, linguistic or imaginary. The dual nature of the threshold, which both opens into and signals a limit, heralds movement and continuity on the one hand, but also invokes potential resistance on the other hand. Departing from the semiotic approach adopted by Genette in his seminal study on paratexts as ‘thresholds of interpretation’, this work seeks to examine thresholds as strategic sites of negotiation for translators. Their visibility, in particular, is associated with forms of trespassing that tease out the concepts of authority and originality. When it comes to Caribbean writing, thresholds are presented as ambiguous sites of opaque revelations, a view that contrasts with a more traditional understanding of paratext as a space aiming towards (absolute) clarification of the text. Rather, liminality is presented as favouring acts of subversion whereby Caribbean writing emerges as a literature that manifests constant (re)appropriations and generates renewed (af)filiations for the region. Problematic crossings are also explored to reveal that thresholds act as enclaves of cultural resistance where Caribbean literature is concerned. Here, Caribbean untranslatabilities are investigated as a feature of the region’s fragmentary nature, which, once turned into a poetics of translation based on reciprocal hospitality, offers possible routes of access to a pan-Caribbean cultural memory. Further analysis of translational paratexts as sites of reparation not only seeks to dislocate classics such as Césaire’s Cahier away from corrective manipulations of the text, it also aims to relocate Caribbean writing within a tradition of transculturation and creolization. Here, acts of self-translation expose the importance of self-legitimacy for those Caribbean writers who decide to adopt a bilingual approach to their writing, and raises the issue of whether or not any form of Caribbean writing that circulates on a global scale ultimately becomes a product of translation. The last sections of the thesis argue in favour of alternative models of circulation for Caribbean literature, in which translation is conceived as a series of archipelagic crossings that generates new coordinates for transoceanic solidarities. In turn, re-thinking translation from the perspective of Caribbean ecologies allows us to present a translocal approach to cultural circulation.