This paper looks at Guy Butler's theories about English South Africans and the English language. I have outlined his reputation as a critical thinker, poet and scholar, with a view to understanding the role he has played as an individual in South African cultural politics. I have also tried to trace some of the social roots and implications of the ideas he puts forward and the social purposes these serve. These have been investigated from a 'political' and sociological perspective. I have concentrated on his socio-political discourses as they have appeared in conference papers, journal articles and newspaper articles and the media response to the ideas has also been analysed. Butler's poetry and more properly literary work is not a direct concern of this paper and is not given extensive attention. I have concluded that Butler's work is an interpretation of South African reality which serves the purpose of promoting a set of mythical goals and purposes for English South Africans based on the founding myth of the 1820 settlers in the Eastern Cape.

English Studies began in Canada in 1884 at Dalhousie University; Canadian literature was first taught at the post-secondary level in 1907 at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. Arnoldian humanism dominated the outlook of early professors of English in Canada. Their feeling that Canadian literature was not among "the best" explains why so few courses appeared in Canadian universities, despite nationalist pressure from students. About 5-10% of courses then were devoted to Canadian literature in the English curriculum and this (except in Quebec) remains the case today.

This study examines Lawrence's views of nature and their relations to perspectives drawn from Oriental traditions and philosophies. Many of Lawrence's non-Christian perspectives concerning the universe and man's relationship with nature bear strong affinities with Eastern thought systems, particularly his understanding of such fundamental matters as the enigma of nature, nature's duality and oneness, the mutual identity between man and nature, issues of god and evolution, mind and body, life and death, and sexuality, and concerns with intuition, spontaneity and primitivism. Lawrence met with hostility and prejudice from the literary world partly because some of his viewpoints were misread and misunderstood. However, they can be to a large degree explained and justified by traditional Oriental thought. In Lawrence's understanding of man's integrity and "living wholeness", we have his "indecent" proposition of sexuality, his "strange" assertion of blood consciousness and stress upon the solar plexus, his rejection of mind and intellect, and his preference for desire over ideology, and for primitivism over industrial materialism. These are views parallel to those of Taoism, though they also have their traces in the Western scientific readings which Lawrence was familiar with. Lawrence's transcendental attitude towards nature accounts for his extraordinary sensitivity to the natural world, and for his radical criticism of modern civilizations, sciences and the mechanical life, particularly in terms of financial motivation. The study of Lawrence's philosophy of nature suggests that Lawrence is an outstanding example of twentieth-century Romanticism. Furthermore, in Lawrence and in his work, we see a prominent figure in the development of a new environmental consciousness in literature.

This thesis examines the relationship between fictional depictions of rape and legal and social realities between 1700 and 1765, and argues that these contexts are essential to reconstruct contemporary understandings of rape in this period. Rape was presented differently in legislation, legal texts, trials and literature, reflecting the varied ideas of what constituted a rape. The research begins by asking why the statutory definition of rape was inconsistent with legal practice, and how clear the legal conventions of rape were in contemporary society. This leads to a series of case studies investigating why Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Samuel Richardson were interested in rape, how their depictions of rape relate to legal realities and were informed by their own legal knowledge, and what form of interpretation the authors invite. The geographical focus on London is occasioned by the selection of trials, largely heard at the Old Bailey, and texts published in London, but acknowledges the wider national readership for the texts and trials, which were often reported in the press and/or published. The historical parameters reflect the decline in standardized legal education and increased reliance on legal texts from 1700, and the lack of a significant contemporary legal treatise to guide interpretations of statutory and common law until the publication of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769). This study contributes to existing scholarship on rape in the eighteenth century. Criticism in this area has begun to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to this subject. This thesis combines legal and non-legal sources to inform its analysis, suggesting that critical approaches need to use a wider range of sources to reconstruct the context in which contemporary portrayals of rape were situated. Part two of this thesis offers new readings of canonical works, showing how Pope, Defoe, Richardson, Smollett and Fielding engaged with wider contextual legal discourse in their works, and explores their reasons for doing so. These case studies assert the importance of legal and social contexts, offer new ways of interpreting rape in literature, and show that literary authors negotiated and presented ideas of rape in a variety of ways in their texts, influencing public perceptions of the nature and illegality of such acts.

My thesis will discuss British Romantic period author and philanthropist Hannah More. I aim to portray her from a perspective that demonstrates her compelling and varying nature, that includes religion and rhetoric as persuasive tools met at times with resistance and at other times compliance. Her work called for educational reform on two accounts: firstly, for a system of education for the poor, and secondly, to reeducate middle and upper class women’s philanthropy. I focus on her didactic literature, namely Cheap Repository Tracts, and the prevalence of her Evangelical zeal embedded in the tracts. I draw particular attention to the stories of The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, Black Giles the Poacher, and Betty Brown, the St. Giles’s Orange Girl. I argue that traditional understandings of didactic narratives as a low form of literature are misleading and that More’s work exemplifies didactic fiction as a form of literature capable of empowering readers and authors alike. Furthermore, I study the social function aspects of Cheap Repository Tracts as they demonstrated a newfound accessibility to a large and varying audience.

My thesis will discuss British Romantic period author and philanthropist Hannah More. I aim to portray her from a perspective that demonstrates her compelling and varying nature, that includes religion and rhetoric as persuasive tools met at times with resistance and at other times compliance. Her work called for educational reform on two accounts: firstly, for a system of education for the poor, and secondly, to reeducate middle and upper class women’s philanthropy. I focus on her didactic literature, namely Cheap Repository Tracts, and the prevalence of her Evangelical zeal embedded in the tracts. I draw particular attention to the stories of The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, Black Giles the Poacher, and Betty Brown, the St. Giles’s Orange Girl. I argue that traditional understandings of didactic narratives as a low form of literature are misleading and that More’s work exemplifies didactic fiction as a form of literature capable of empowering readers and authors alike. Furthermore, I study the social function aspects of Cheap Repository Tracts as they demonstrated a newfound accessibility to a large and varying audience.

In this MA-thesis, I investigate the usage of musical terminology in the study of modern, post-metric poetry. I present the theoretical field «musico-literary studies», and point to some examples of inconsistent vocabulary in the critical debate on musicalized poetry. I also examine the effectiveness of the musical analogy in the analysis of poetic texts, and put this to the test in three textual analyses: «Some soldier wrote» by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, «Absentia animi» by Gunnar Ekelöf and Solaris korrigert by Øyvind Rimbereid. The thesis concludes that the musical analogy and the use of a musical vocabulary should be used with some care. Although it can often highlight interesting compositional and even thematic aspects of poetic texts, the analogy only becomes fully functional when the text is structured by the same principles as the musical form in question.

As the Holocaust passes out of living memory, this thesis re-evaluates the potential of commemorative landscapes to engender meaningful and textualised encounters with a past which, all too often, seems distant and untouchable. As the concentration camps and mass graves that shape our experiential access to this past are integrated into tourist itineraries, associated discourse is increasingly delimited by a pervasive sense of memorial fatigue which is itself compounded by the notion that the experiences of the Holocaust are beyond representation; that they deny, evade or transcend communication and comprehension. Harnessing recent developments across memory studies, cultural geography and ecocritical literary theory, this thesis contends that memory is always in production and never produced; always a journey and never a destination. In refusing the notion of an ineffable past, I turn to the texts and topographies that structure contemporary encounters with the Holocaust and consider their potential to create an ethically grounded and reflexive past-present engagement. Topographies of Suffering explores three case studies: the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial, Weimar, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. These landscapes are revealed as evolving palimpsests; multi-layered, multi-dimensional and texturised spaces always subject to ongoing processes of mediation and remediation. I examine memory’s locatedness in landscape alongside the ways it may travel according to diverse literary and spatial de-territorializations. The thesis overall brings three disparate sites together as places in which the past can be encounterable, immersive and affective. In doing so, it looks to a future in which the others of the past can be faced, and in which the alibi of ineffability can be consigned to history

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Bibliography: pages 116-117. / The three television channels provided by the South African Broadcasting Corporation target different demographic sectors of the South African population. A survey was conducted quantifying advertisements shown on SABC 1, which caters for a mainly black audience, and on SABC3, which caters for a mainly white audience. The semiotic codes employed to engage the viewers were recorded, tabulated and measured. The differences between the codes used on each channel were compared and tested for statistical significance. Significant differences were observed in the type of speech used by the advertisements, the race of the characters, the types of products advertised, the lifestyles portrayed and the type of rhetoric used. Specific examples were subjected to textual analysis to gauge where the approaches to the audiences differed or converged. A number of strategies were observed, reflecting the advertisers' perceptions of the audiences' relationships with the economic and political establishments. Corporate advertisements often represent the diversity of South African society, establishing a corporate identity as a unifying feature. Advertisements for financial services either exploit white anxieties, or black optimism, encouraging investment or credit purchases respectively. A stereotype representing South African isolation and backwardness is often presented as a negative identity, implying a progressive alternative to which the product is integral. Allegories of societal transformation also feature, with varying moods of anxiety or excitement depending on the audience.