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This essay is a comparative study and a semiotic analysis of a selection of artworks from the artists Sigrid Hjertén and Siri Derkert. The purpose of this paper is to study the artworks from a gender perspective. The purpose is also to examine if there are reflections and connections in their art that reflects both of the artist lives and if they in some way exceeded the norm. From each artist I have chosen artworks with similar motives, a self-portrait, one where they have painted their children, and one of an exotic woman. / Denna uppsats är en komparativ studie där ett urval verk av konstnärerna Sigrid Hjertén och Siri Derkert analyseras semiotiskt. Studiens syfte är att ur ett genusperspektiv studera om det finns reflektioner och kopplingar i deras konst som speglar deras liv och om de i sitt skapande på något sätt överskred normen. De urval verk som uppsatsen berör är tre konstverk från respektive konstnär med liknande motiv, ett självporträtt, ett verk där deras barn är avbildade och slutligen ett verk där bägge konstnärerna avbildat en ”exotisk kvinna”.

Migrant (1959-1960) and Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.(1962-1967) were two little magazines edited respectively by British poets Gael Turnbull and Ian Hamilton Finlay. This thesis aims to explore the magazines’ contributions to the diversification of British poetry in the 1960s, via their commitment to transnational exchange and publication of innovative poetries. My investigation is grounded on the premise that little magazines, as important but neglected socio-literary forms, provide a nuanced picture of literary history by revealing the shifting activities and associations between groups of writers and publishers. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova, I argue that Migrant and Poor.Old.Tired.Horse were exceptionally outward-looking publications bringing various kinds of poetic forms, both historical and contemporary, local and international, to new audiences, and creating literary networks in the process. A brief overview of the post-war British poetry scene up until 1967, and the role of little magazines within this period, will contextualize Turnbull’s and Finlay’s activities as editors and publishers. Migrant is examined as a documentation of Turnbull’s early years as a poet-publisher in Britain, Canada, and the US. I argue that Turnbull’s magazine is at once a manifestation of the literary friendships he forged, a negotiation of American poetic theories, and a formulation of a new British-American literary network. Identifying Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto as a particular influence on Turnbull, I examine aspects of Olson’s conceptualization of poetry as a dynamic process of unfolding in the content and ethos of Migrant. Finlay’s attitudes to internationalism and use of vernacular speech in poetry are compared to those of Hugh MacDiarmid to demonstrate that Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. emerged out of both a rejection and engagement with an older generation of Scottish writers. The content and organisation of the magazine, I argue, bear Finlay’s consideration of art as play. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s positing of language as games, I examine the magazine as a series of playful procedures where a variety of formal experimentations were enacted.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, many of the British government’s attempts to rebuild the social order and improve standards were experienced through design. This was true not only in the home and in the workplace, but also in the everyday civic environment of the street. Ensuring that objects as ubiquitous as lampposts, litterbins and parking meters adopted the visual language of modern design – while at the same time, remaining inconspicuous - was perceived as being vitally important by the authorities concerned. For it was through such objects that Britain’s new social and cultural agenda was given physical expression, and Good Design was deliberately introduced into people’s everyday lives. Yet for a category of object designed to be ignored, postwar street furniture prompted considerable debate. For some members of the public, the new designs were grotesque, and represented a defacement of the country and its landscape’s individual character. While for others, modern street furniture design was a means of civilizing Britain’s streets. The design of these objects also drew strong feelings from the groups involved with its improvement, including central and local government, the Council of Industrial Design and other state-advisory bodies, manufacturers, and civic groups. Sometimes this multi-layered group worked to improve the design of street furniture together, and sometimes in opposition. This thesis is concerned with the critical reception of street furniture design in postwar Britain, and the debate these objects prompted. It emerges out of an interest in the systems and structures underpinning design culture, and a belief that reading the banal built world expands our knowledge of how political power works. Rather than prioritise the designed objects themselves or the intentions of those responsible for producing them – such as the designers and manufacturers – the thesis will expand the debate to include the wide variety of contemporary viewpoints that were expressed, both in public and private, in response to the promotion, dissemination and design of modern street furniture. Extending the discussion beyond the official design narrative to other, equally important voices reflects a more accurate picture of the process through which street furniture was discussed, understood and even determined during this period. Using extensive primary material from archives, contemporary periodicals and newspapers, and interviews with street furniture designers practicing in the postwar period, the five chapters of this thesis address the different arguments employed by the multiplicity of voices active in the debate. While many of these arguments focused on dichotomies - between old and new, local and central, modern and traditional - the thesis contends that postwar dissent over street furniture was informed by wider debates about Good Design, design’s relationship to high and low culture, its social and moral responsibilities, and taste. The dominance of such themes throughout the thesis reflects the wider social context of the period, which witnessed considerable changes to the authority of its institutions and cultural hierarchy, as well as more timely debates about power, influence and class in the shaping of public life.

In the early 20th century, authors increasingly experimented with literary techniques striving towards two common aims: to illumine the inner life of their protagonists and to diverge from conventional forms of literary representations of reality. This shared endeavour was sparked by changes in society: industrialisation, developments in psychology, and the gradual decay of empires, such as the Victorian (1837–1901) and the Austro-Hungarian (1867–1918). Those developments yielded a sense of uncertainty and disorientation, which led to a so-called “turn [inwards]” in the arts (Micale 2). In this context, this essay examines Virginia Woolf’s (1882–1941) development of her literary technique by comparing To the Lighthouse (1927), written in free indirect discourse, with Arthur Schnitzler’s (1862–1932) Fräulein Else (1924), written in interior monologue. Instead of applying Freud’s theories of consciousness, I will demonstrate how empiricist psychology informed and partly helped shape the two narrative techniques by referring to Ernst Mach’s (1838–1916) idea of the unstable self, and William James’ (1842–1910) concept of the stream of consciousness. Furthermore, I will show that there is a continuous progression of literary ideas from Schnitzler’s Viennese fin-de-siècle connected to impressionism, towards Woolf’s Bloomsbury aesthetics connected to Paul Cézanne’s post-impressionist logic of sensations. In addition to that, I address how the women’s movement, starting in the end of the 19th century, inspired Woolf and Schnitzler to utilise their techniques as a means of revealing women’s restricted position in society. Methodologically, I will analyse the two novels’ narrative techniques applying close reading and by that point out their differences and similarities in connection to the above-mentioned theories as well as the two author’s literary approaches. I argue that this comparison demonstrates that modernist literary techniques of representing interiority evolved from interior monologue towards free indirect discourse. This progression also implicates that modernism can be seen as a continuum reaching back to the fin-de-siècle and culminating in the 1920s.

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The Convergence of Arcadia is a story about people losing things. Stretching from the Jim Crow South, the Korean War, New York City and central Kentucky circa 1980, this story follows a one armed man who has given up on life, a sheriff haunted by his past, a Korean War veteran with a terrible secret and a family broken from suicide. The Convergence of Arcadia follows three families as their fates are inextricably wove together in the tradition of Southern Gothic literature.

Critics of Edith Wharton frequently discuss the material culture that pervades her work, but the trend in doing so has been to rush past the things themselves and engage in abstracted conversations of theory. I would like to suggest that a closer scrutiny of the individual objects being presented in Wharton’s novels can highlight Wharton’s own theoretical approaches to material culture. Working from Bill Brown's distinction between objects and things, I want to argue that Wharton firmly situates the material culture in The Age of Innocence in the background of her characters' lives as objects which they utilize as extensions of the self; but she brings the thingness of material culture to the forefront in Twilight Sleep, where the material culture in the novel alternately stands out and malfunctions, as characters attempt—and fail—to construct coherent and livable identities for themselves in the face of a 1920s New York that Wharton depicts as a paradoxically over-furnished wasteland. I will ultimately argue that things, problematic as they are, become a matter of survival strategy for her characters in Twilight Sleep when they utilize them to reconstruct the social relations that have become increasingly threatened from the world of The Age of Innocence. / text

At the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was an international center for music, art, and fashion. It fostered the creation of a variety of innovative artistic developments and is widely considered to be the birthplace of Modernism. Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, the epitome of modernist innovation, could only have happened in this unique cultural climate in the context of the Franco-Russian alliance. Stravinsky's early musical development reached its peak in his early ballets, most notably Le Sacre du printemps. This work is a culmination of the multiplicity of cultural activities that include art, scenario, choreography, and music that came together in Paris. In this essay, I will explore the various ways in which the city of Paris in the beginning of the twentieth century influenced Stravinsky's musical voice. My discussion moves from an overview of the city to Stravinsky, exploring the ways in which the Parisian environment shaped his compositional style. To this end, Le Sacre du printemps is viewed as a kind of lightning rod, bringing together many of the fundamental artistic developments of the early twentieth century and reflecting the diverse and modern city in which it was premiered. / text

My title echoes Agha Shahid Ali’s sentiment of needing to move beyond the linguistic nationalism of “English” toward a more varied understanding of Anglophone writing within multiple contexts in the world. In three theoretical case studies from four linguistic and literary traditions (English, Bengali, Spanish, and Hindi-Urdu), I explore the dimensions and definitions of comparative Anglophone and world literature, comparative poetics, and a comparative study of novels – in the global postcolonial world. I focus on moments of translatability and untranslatability to question traditional models for studies in English and comparative literature that do not account for translation. Each of my chapters shows how texts in the “original” or “translation” do not always circulate from a homogenized metropolitan center to a marginalized periphery, and unlike in the elite North American and Parisian world where untranslatability often inspires terror and loss of language, translations can act as connecting forces that create organic dialogue in the global south on modernism and postcolonial discourses that go beyond Europe and America / text