This thesis explores the relationship between the avant-garde and humour during two critical historical periods: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the early years of the Cuban Revolution (1959-1961). It focuses on those authors and magazines which persisted with the avant-garde approach despite the highly politicized climate. Some of them combined political compromise with the avant-garde. Others prioritised the avant-garde solely. The main object of study is comics oriented to an adult audience published in periodicals, clandestine magazines and, especially, the so called revista de trincheras during the Spanish Civil War. The medium, graphic narrative, helped to overcome literacy problems, while humour served as a communicative bridge to better spread the intended messages. In Cuba, the first two years of the Revolution were an ongoing process of defining a new political, cultural and social system. Graphic humour played a significant role in that task, further developing an already very rich national tradition. In that process of consolidation, the experimental humour magazine El Pitirre, very much under the umbrella of Lunes de Revolucion, approached humour as a liminal space, a space of conflict and instability with a universal drive, from existentialism to criticism of Imperialism, formally renovating graphic humour in Cuba by using a minimal but expressive line.

This thesis seeks to examine the subject of literary history in swedish upper secondary school, that is for students between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. The background of the choice of subject is that it in relation to its place in curriculum and in comparansion concerning reasearch about students reading and other question about literature, there is shortage of reaserach. The investigation is based on hypothesis that the teacher attitude towards the subject of literary history affects the teaching in greater extent than in other part of the swedish subject. To examine the teachers’, on the one hand, underlying ideas of the purpose of the literary history subject and on the other hand the teachers’ didactic view of how they design the teaching the attituted were divided into two subcategories, idealistic attitudes and realistic attitudes. The former represent teachers idea of the subject of literary history and the latter represent teachers attitude towards the subject in its teaching. The investigation was done by partially examining literary definitions and governing documents, but first and foremost by survey and interviews. Through the literature review the conlusion is drawn that the subject of literary history is challenged by aspects linked to the lack of a establiched methods of writing the history of literature and the question of its content. The empiric result shows that the dominant idealistic attitude towards the subject of literary history as important because it promotes students’ understanding of history in more general terms. By teaching literary history, the teachers want to bring out the likeness between the students’ present with the text’s past. Overall the opinion of participating teachers is that there should be more room for literary history in the subject of swedish. The result also shows a tendency that teachers who only organize their teaching chronologically feel that they have less opportunity to teach in the way they want to. This in comparasion to teachers who organize their teaching both chronologically and thematically, who to a greater extent feel satisfied. Based on the result the thesis in the end discusses the importance of further reaserach on the subject aswell as oppurtunities that a more established theoretical language could bring to the subject of literary history.

Britain imported a vast number of cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were largely male garments in India at the time, which became popular dress accessories for British women. The demand for these shawls was opportune for textile manufacturers at home – particularly in Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley, who launched a thriving industry of shawls, ‘made in imitation of the Indian’. There has been considerable scholarship on cashmere shawls and their European copies in textile history. However, it has enjoyed no such prominence in literary studies. This PhD thesis examines Cashmere and ‘Paisley’ shawls in works of literature. Indian shawls are mentioned in a number of literary texts, including plays, poems, novels, opera, and satire. A wide variety of writers such as Richard Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Wilkie Collins (to name a few) depict these textiles in their works. For these writers, I argue, shawls provide a means to explore Britain’s changing social and imperial identity through the prism of material culture. The sheer incidence of ‘shawls’ in printed discourse furthermore suggests that they went beyond the realm of everyday fashion to constitute one of the important narratives of nineteenth-century Britain. In emphasising the significance of material culture and recovering new historical contexts, this investigation raises important questions relating to the links between industry and trade, and literary production. I rely on literary criticism, scholarship on India, and textile history to examine the phenomenon of cashmere shawls. In the wider context of postcolonialism, the research suggests that instead of the Saidian model which viewed the East as an abject ‘Other,’ colonies actually exerted a reverse and important influence on the imperial centre. A new emphasis on Indian things in literature, this work hopes, will contribute a fresh strand of thought to studies of imperialism.

This dissertation first sets out to place Du Bartas' Les Semaines in its religious and epic setting, and argues that the poem's mission is to exist as poetry and as religious instruction at the same time. From this and its philosophical backdrop emerges a poetry that emphasises equation, or fusion, over comparison. Antique-type similes are therefore summarily examined and connected with the "primary" sensibilities of Homer. The proper fusive style and language of Sylvester's translation are then considered. Its style is found to be conscious to a degree, relying especially on repetitional devices of catechistic value, such as anaphora and symploce; on devices of oxymoronic and paradoxical metamorphosis, such as agnominatio; and on devices of epigrammatic summary, such as chiasmus. The language of Sylvester's Du Bartas is then examined closely in two domains, those of its scientific and natural description. The two are not wholly separable. It is found that Sylvester's language, as Du Bartas, must be interpreted at more than its literal level; that three levels of interpretation along the lines of three levels of allegory are implicit. This is so in respect the italicised language so prominent in Divine Weeks, discussed in Chapter 5, and in respect of the adjectival and verbal language discussed in Chapter 7. One way of designating the organising principle lying behind these language hieroglyphs is as emblem book turned purely into words. This is insensitive to the poetic third level of Operation, which seeks to do more than teach, which seeks to inspire. This dissertation relates Sylvester's language to two traditions of English poetry, as different one from the other as noun is from adjective: the metaphysical school and the Augustan period. It argues that metaphysical poetry is enthralled with Du Bartas' conceits in Sylvester's translation, is influenced by them, and takes them up. These conceits are nonetheless often one-word, substantive, and hieroglyphic. Augustan poetry on the other hand takes up a Sylvestrian diction, often unaware of its implications, because it deems this language the true language of poetry. The rather dramatic place given to Divine Weeks in the development of English poetic diction is dealt with at a statistical level in an excursus on Sylvester's word and language formulations.

Tracing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Scottish Men's Fiction takes account of the representation of masculinities in a selected group of novels by twentieth-century Scottish male authors. Rather than attempt a chronological survey of fictions during this period, the argument proceeds by analysing groups of texts which are axiomatic in specific ways: the Glasgow realist novels of the 1930s and post-1970s, from the works of James Barke and George Blake to those of William McIlvanney and James Kelman, which offer particular perspectives on relationships between men of different class identifications; fictions reliant upon existentialism, which intersect with the masculinist values of the Glasgow tradition in the figure of Kelman, but are also produced by Alexander Trocchi and Irvine Welsh; and novels which employ the technique of 'cross-writing', or literary transvestism, from the Renaissance fictions of Lewis Grassic Gibbon to the postmodern works of Alan Warner and Christopher Whyte. In a critical field which has always been concerned with a tradition of largely male-produced texts privileging the actions of male characters, but has neglected fully to consider the production and reception of those texts in terms of their specific articulations of gender positions, this thesis employs theories of masculinities developed in the study of American and English literatures since the 1980s in order to provide new perspectives on Scottish novels. It also draws upon the materialist theory of Louis Althusser for a model of ideological identification, as well as utilising several psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to gender formation in Western culture, epitomised by the work of Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman. The various perspectives on masculine gender and sexual identities thus assembled are primarily directed towards considering the novels under discussion as 'men's texts' - texts not only by or about men, but often directed towards men as readers too.

This thesis seeks to address the literary, cultural and historical questions surrounding what I will suggest was the reconceptualization of fame in the second half of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth centuries. The only previous analyses of celebrity in this period by Leo Braudy and by Frank Donoghue have claimed categorically that even though a democratization of fame occurred in this period only men had sufficient access to the fame machine and thus to the experience of the frenzy of renown. While I argue that this period witnessed the birth of modern concepts of celebrity, I will suggest that a modernization necessarily entailed a feminization of fame. Traditionally, heroic self-sacrifice had led to assured immortality, but with the rapidly expanding print culture of this period, celebrity was often instantaneous, achieved during a lifetime rather than a lifetime achievement. With the dissemination of the media, the rise of newspaper and periodicals and thus, more importantly, the increasing visibility of the celebrity as a person to be admired and emulated came the means to seduce an eager audience by manipulating one’s career or personal image. Opening with an examination of the confessional politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who sought and found a desiring audience for this outpouring of private sensibility and thus initiated a discourse of fame which no longer relied upon the classical stoicism apparent since Ancient Rome, I will investigate how women writers not only ‘puffed’ themselves in the press, but actively engaged in constructing distinct authorial personae in and through their writings. Far from cowering anonymously in the shades, women writers were actively seeking and achieving the limelight, attaining a level of cultural centrality previously thought by critics such as Braudy and Donoghue to be unattainable. Embracing the public and publicity itself, they took advantage of the shifting mechanics of celebrity to place their writings and, ultimately, themselves, on the rostrum, more than eager to gain literary laurels.

Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespear has offered the first taste of Shakespearean drama to children for nearly two hundred years. Though it has not always been realised, the book has become one of the most influential publications related to the study of Shakespeare. However, academic studies of Lambs' tales are scarce and often inadequate. This thesis is the first extensive and detailed study of Lambs' tales, which also explores their profound influence. It consists of two volumes. In Volume One, I examine the roles of the Lambs as children' s writers; including, how Charles integrated his Romantic criticism into the six tragic tales, and how Mary campaigned for educational reform through her fourteen comic and romantic stories. Moreover, I have identified which editions of Shakespeare' s plays were used by the Lambs as their textual basis. With fresh evidence, I also bridge over many gaps in the publishing history regarding both Lambs' tales and their rival publications. Volume Two is an edition-based annotated bibliography of prose narratives adapted for children from Shakespeare' s plays 1807-1998. The Annotated Bibliography is the most complete documentation on this subject. It covers 42 different versions of Shakespeare stories, and includes, altogether, 304 entries.

The thesis is approximately 60,000 words in length and is divided into three parts. Part I (Chapters 1-4) deals with Hudibras in relation to seventeenth century literary traditions. Chapter 1 introduces the poem and its author, places Hudibras within its immediate historical context, describes its popularity, and states the problem of determining its genre; several possible solutions to the problem are considered, notably those of seventeenth and eighteenth century writers; "mock-heroic" is defined and adopted. Chapter 2 is a survey: it begins by citing two adverse modern criticisms of Butler's method of ridiculing his principal character, and then sets out to test the justness of them. A number of romances popular in the seventeenth century are described; criticism of them is considered; and several satirical and burlesque works using romantic characters, motifs, and plots are analyzed. Chapter 3 places Hudibras with respect to the works and attitudes described in the previous chapter. The generating circumstances of the first part of the poem are considered in the light of Butler's presentation of them as a romance; Hudibras and Halpho are examined in relation to other mock-knights and squires, especially Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Braggadochio and Trompart. Chapter 4 treats Hudibras in connexion with the seventeenth century tradition of classical burlesque, analyzes Butler's treatment of classical themes and characters for the purpose of satire, and in an extended comparison between Hudibras and Gondibert examines Butler's criticism of the heroic ideals of love and military valour. Part II (Chapters 5 and 6) comprises studies of several elements of Butler's literary method in Hudibras. Chapter 5 analyzes Butler's use of metaphor and of dramatic argument as satirical techniques. Chapter 6 treats the mock-speeches (III,ii) and the burlesque heroical epistles, as well as the narrative method of Hudibras, and the device of the comic narrator. Part III consists of three appendices. Appendix A deals with the question of the identity of the 'West Country knight' upon whom Butler says that he based the character of Hudibras. The evidence in favour of Sir Samuel Luke and Sir Hanry Rosewell is examined and Sir Samuel Rolle is presented as the most likely 'original' of Hudibras A certain amount of evidence in his favour is given for the first time in this appendix. Appendix B criticizes the identification of Ralpho in the 'Key to Hudibras' (1715), presenting for the first time the source from which the author of the 'Key' drew the portrait of 'Isaac Robinson,' the man upon whom (he claims) Butler based his characterization of Ralpho. Appendix C criticizes the attribution to Butler (currently accepted) of Mercurius Menippeus, a political pamphlet first published in 1680 and containing a passage of invective against Sir Samuel Luke. It is argued that the attribution is virtually without foundation.

This dissertation examines the use made of details from the natural world by English poets of the mid-seventeenth century. It is concerned with two main aspects of the subjects the function of natural imagery; and the rhetorical methods by which details from nature are exploited in poetry. It also seeks to demonstrate that the way a poet manipulates his material is influenced both by inherited literary tradition, and also by his age's changing conception of the nature of the universe and of man's relationship to it. Part One of the thesis explores the implications of the title in the light of some early critical treatments of the subject of Nature in poetry and of more recent theories of seventeenth-century imagery and rhetoric, and surveys those changes in the thought and sensibility of the period which seem to have had a bearing on the poetic handling of natural imagery. Part Two investigates the various ways in which details from nature were employed by poets during the years 1645-1668. The material has been organised under three general headings, dictated by the function of the images in the poems in which they occur. Part Three examines the work of seven poets whose contribution is deemed to be of particular interest. Their poetry is related to the wider cultural setting discussed in Part One and to the literary background provided in Part Two. Part Four furnishes a brief survey of some of the major lines of development in the use of natural details in the poetry of the period immediately following the years studied in the main body of the thesis. The study concludes with three appendices and a bibliography of books and articles cited and consulted in the course of its composition.

At present no scholar has provided an in-depth study into the dissemination of the Pater Noster outside the clerical sphere. This thesis provides a detailed consideration of the ways in which the Pater Noster was taught to the laity in medieval England. It explores the central position of the prayer in the lay curriculum, the constitutions which played a fundamental role in its teaching, and the methods by which it was disseminated. Clerical expositions of the prayer and its tabular and diagrammatic representations are examined to consider the material available to assist the clergy in their pedagogical role. The ways in which material associated with the Pater Noster was modified and delivered to a lay audience provides an important component in the holistic approach of this thesis. The thesis itself proposes that the prayer was widely known and recited, drawing on a variety of mediums in which it was presented to the laity. These include sermon material, which would have been delivered in the vernacular; the recitation of Paternosters, an earlier version of the conventional rosary; the performance of the Pater Noster plays in the northern locations of York, Beverley and Lincoln; and representations of the prayer in wall paintings.