‘The Influence of British Rule on Elite Indian Menswear: The Birth of the Sherwani’ is a study of the influence of politics on fashion and the resulting development of new garments. This research is designed to demonstrate the effect on elite Indian menswear of the two centuries of British rule in India. It is an effort to understand how the flowing garments worn by elite Indian men in the 18th century gradually became more tailored and fitted with the passage of time. The study uses multiple sources to bring to light lesser known facts about Indian menswear, the evolution of different garments and especially of the sherwani. The sherwani is a knee-length upper garment worn by South-Asian men, and is considered to be India’s traditional menswear. My study highlights the factors responsible for the birth of the sherwani and dispels the myth that it was a garment worn by the Mughals. Simultaneously, this study examines the concept and value of ‘tradition’ in cultures. It scrutinises the reasons for the sherwani being labelled as a traditional Indian garment associated with the Mughal era, when in fact it was born towards the end of the 19th century. The study also analyses the role of the sherwani as a garment of distinction in pre- and post-independence India.

The 1940s are undoubtedly the years most neglected by scholars of Italian Futurism. The movement had long supported Fascism, but its vocal endorsement of Mussolini’s regime and its military adventures at this time is widely considered to represent Futurism’s ultimate betrayal of those ‘progressive’, counter-cultural values popularly associated with the avant-garde. For many, the movement’s apparent engagement with the forces of reaction and conservatism is reflected in the work produced by its artists throughout the war years, which is invariably presented in terms of propaganda imagery, characterised by an unchallenging and retrogressive figurative vocabulary. However, this thesis argues that the 1940s cannot be said to reveal a rupture in either the ideological or aesthetic foundations of the movement, and that common assumptions regarding the crude, rhetorical and one-dimensional nature of Futurist painting (and poetry) during this period are not necessarily borne out by the works themselves. The text also examines the movement’s status within the cultural establishment at this time. It challenges the notion that the reverberations within Italy of Nazism’s campaign against modern art during the late 1930s were irrevocably to prejudice the Fascist regime and its institutions against Futurism. Indeed, it is argued that one can no more consider the 1940s a period of decline from the point of view of the movement’s political fortunes than one can from an artistic perspective. Of course, Futurism did not survive the war. However, it is suggested that whilst the cataclysmic events of 1943-44 were to seal its fate, they also served to liberate the imaginations of Marinetti and his followers, reawakening the movement’s original, visionary spirit, and inspiring a final burst of creativity that anticipated ‘the future of Futurism’.

It is a widely debated subject whether a patient with a diagnosis of major depression and a history of psychosis is able to use and comprehend metaphors. There are a number of studies that indicate that metaphor comprehension with this population is very reduced. However, within the context of psychotherapy metaphor is poorly defined and the concept is often applied inconsistently in academic literature. This thesis examines a commonly reported occurrence of metaphor formation in art psychotherapy and in particular, examines a type of metaphor that offers a novel perspective about interpersonal relationships called the creative relationship metaphor. This thesis aims to develop a definition of a form of metaphor that is helpful in clinical practice and understand the clinical formation of this metaphor in art psychotherapy. The first part of the thesis develops a new metaphor type, called the ‘creative relationship metaphor’ (CRM), beginning with a psycholinguistic perspective. 2 3 In summary, the key characteristics of the CRM being developed is that it is: • An interpersonal event • An image based representation which is cognitively mapped • Context dependent • A novel way of perceiving the person, thing or event The hypothesis that patients diagnosed with severe mental health issues can produce CRMs is tested through two analyses. The first analysis focuses on the defining features of the creative relationship metaphor and the second analysis focuses on the therapist’s influence on metaphor formation. In the clinical examples, the increased capacity to reflect on significant relationships is linked to the formation of the CRM. These results offer preliminary evidence suggesting that there are specific in-session interventions that support the development of the CRM in the assessment context.

From flamenco guitarists to parlour pianists, Matisse’s images of music-making often appear within decorative scenes of gleaming carpets, multi-coloured costumes and lavishly embroidered wall hangings. All of these textiles and more comprised what he called ‘ma bibliothèque de travail’, a working library of inspiration that he maintained throughout his career. ‘I am made up of everything I have seen,’ he remarked, to which he might have added, ‘and heard.’ Practising, performing, listening and concert-going: music, like textiles, was a lifelong pursuit. But his passion for them is not simply of anecdotal significance, nor does it explain their mere co-existence as the subject-matter of his art. Rather, just as music and textiles are interwoven at every stage of his life, so too is their structural and conceptual significance in his work. In a series of case studies, a single textile from his working library is paired with the art it inspired: the kasāya robe and 'The Song of the Nightingale'; the Moghan rug and the Symphonic Interiors; and the Bakuba velours and 'Jazz'. In each case, visual form is found to have musical counterpart, both in the textiles themselves and as represented by Matisse. This opens up new, more imaginative possibilities of interpreting his visual musicality, which is found to be metaphysical, modal and motivic in concept. Finally, these separate strands are drawn together in a single synoptic analysis of the Chapel of the Rosary, the artist’s self-proclaimed masterpiece and ‘total’ work of art. This thesis explores the expansive musical space created by the reduced visual form of textiles. Considered together for the first time, these enduring and inseparable continuities of Matisse’s art – music and textiles – suggest not only a means of unravelling his own visual musicality, but point towards a much-needed methodology for interpreting this notion more broadly.

This thesis investigates Dalí’s adoption of religious iconography to help represent themes that he had conceptualised through Surrealism, psychoanalysis and other thought systems. His selective use of sources was closely bound to his life circumstances, and I integrate biographical details in my analysis of his paintings. I identify unexpected sources of Dalí's images, and demonstrate how alert he was to the psychological motivations of traditional art. I find he made especial use of the iconography of martyrdom – and the perceptual and cognitive mechanics of the contemplation of death – that foreground the problem of the sexual and mortal self. Part I examines the period 1925-7, when Dalí developed an aesthetic outlook in dialogue with Lorca, formulated in his text, 'Sant Sebastià'. Representations of Sebastian and other martyr saints provided patterns for Dalí's exposition of the generative and degenerating self. In three chapters, based on three paintings, I plot the shift in Dalí's focus from the surface of the physical body – wilfully resistant to emotional engagement, and with classical statuary as a model – to its problematic interior, vulnerable to forces of desire and corruption. This section shows how Dalí's engagement with religious art paradoxically brought him into alignment with Surrealism. In Part II, I contend that many of the familiar images of Dalí’s Surrealist period – in which he considered the self as a fundamentally psychic rather than physical entity – can be traced to the iconography of contemplative saints, particularly Jerome. Through the prism of this re-interpretation, I consider Jerome's task of transcribing Biblical meaning in the context of psychoanalytical theories of cultural production. In Part III, I show how Dalí's later, overt use of religious imagery evolved from within his Surrealism. I trace a condensed, personalised life-narrative through Dalí’s paintings of 1948-52, based on Biblical mythology, but compatible with psychoanalytical theory: from birth to death to an ideal return to the mother's body.

In 1989 the American Surrealist associated painter, sculptor, and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) suggested an intermedial dimension to her multifaceted œuvre in her essay ‘Some Parallels in Word and Pictures.’ Taking this essay as a critical point of departure, this thesis offers an intertextual theorisation of Tanning’s practice. It concerns the role of narrative in her work, and the way in which she borrows from the histories of art and literature as source materials. The thesis presented here is that Tanning’s work from the context of Surrealism and beyond makes reference to the fairy tales and other, more extensive works of literature which she read in her youth whilst at work in her public library in Galesburg, Illinois, whether implicitly in visual references or explicitly in her works’ titles. Throughout, the library is read as a key source of inspiration. This is true too of the impact which Tanning’s belated visit to the Louvre had on her post-Surrealist stylistic development. Broadly, this thesis aims to rethink the methodologies used to interpret Surrealism, and reunite the literary and visual aspects upon which the Surrealist movement was initially founded. This interdisciplinary approach contributes fresh perspectives by marrying the history of Surrealism with that of the fairy tale, including that of Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, and the fairy tale illustrations of Gustave Doré, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, and John Tenniel. The anti-fairy tale emerges as useful critical tool in defining the intertext which appears when Surrealism and the fairy tale are paired. The ‘demythologising’ project of Angela Carter is useful to call upon in the articulation of the anti-fairy tale, and her work is easily placed in dialogue with that of Tanning, especially in terms of its feminist leanings. The dialogic, intertextual theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, further developed by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, support this reading of Tanning’s visual narratives. More recently such theories of intertextuality have manifested themselves in the work of Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal who proposes a model of ‘preposterous history’ in order to creatively re-read the relationship between source (or pre-text) and intertext. This research is primarily text-based and devotes long-awaited attention to Tanning’s literary works which are read visually, including her short story ‘Blind Date’ (1943), and her novel 'Abyss' (1977), later reworked and republished as 'Chasm: A Weekend' (2004). I argue that her novel provides textual continuity with her Surrealist visual narratives of the 1940s creating a more cyclical, ‘preposterous’ shape to her career than has previously been acknowledged.

This thesis considers images of the falling body after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, starting with Associated Press photographer Richard Drew’s photograph of a person falling to their death from the north tower of the World Trade Center. From this specific photograph, this thesis follows various intersecting lines in what I am calling a meshwork of falling-body images. Consequently, each chapter encounters a wide range of examples of falling: from literature to films, personal websites to digital content, and immersive technologies to artworks. Rather than connecting these instances like nodes, this thesis is more concerned with exploring lines of relation and the way the image moves along these lines. This thesis will argue that the falling-body image offers an alternative topology of the attacks: as enmeshed in the unfolding lines of life of web users, artists, directors and writers alike. In this way, this thesis outlines the ways we have lived with the image of falling, and the event itself, and how we continue to experience its unfolding consequences.

This thesis examines written, audio-visual and musical representations of real-life British serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady (the ‘Moors Murderers’) and Peter Sutcliffe (the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’), from the time of their crimes to the present day, and their proliferation beyond the cases’ immediate historical‐legal context. Through the theoretical construct ‘Northientalism’ I interrogate such representations’ replication and engagement of stereotypes and anxieties accruing to the figure of the white working-class ‘Northern’ subject in these cases, within a broader context of pre‐existing historical trajectories and generic conventions of Northern and true crime representation. Interrogating changing perceptions of the cultural functions and meanings of murderers in late--‐capitalist socio--‐cultural history, I argue that the underlying structure of true crime is the counterbalance between the exceptional and the everyday, in service of which its second crucial structuring technique – the depiction of physical detail – operates. Applying the theories of David Schmid and Lisa Downing to a new range of figures and artefacts I demonstrate ways true crime can expose and explore the unequal power relations inherent in capitalism, both constructing the figure of the criminal as – and uncoupling that figure from a mythology that renders them – falsely ontologically separate from normalised forms of violence.

The symbolic role of Helena throughout the Byzantine period has never been considered in any detail. Many of the literary sources, particularly historiographical and hagiological texts, are not easily accessible and have not been translated. The visual sources referring to Helena, such as works of late Roman and Byzantine art, coinage, illustrated manuscripts, reliquaries, and wall paintings, have never been collected. My thesis collects and re-evaluates the textual and visual evidence from the fourth to the fifteenth century in order to explore the origins and development of Helena's cult; the emergence of a Helena-legend with symbolic and metaphorical functions; and the ways that the Byzantines reconstructed, judged, and appreciated her role. Special attention is given to the relationship between word and image, as well as the influence exerted on them by contemporary political and social developments. This thesis demonstrates that memories of Helena as an empress and as a saint were manufactured in several distinct stages over several centuries; and that her role differed in the eastern and western halves of the former Roman empire. The evidence is analysed thematically and in chronological order.

This thesis examines how artists working for the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) represented aerial warfare. In contrast to the scholarly attention lavished on wartime films and posters, official war art remains a much neglected aspect of the propaganda war. The few studies that do exist, most notably by Brian Foss, survey the collection as a whole and consider it from an art history perspective. By focusing on the single theme of aviation, a central and defining experience of the Second World War, I embed the WAAC within the economic, social, military and cultural histories of the period and locate it within a longer time frame. Through bringing these usually disparate fields of study into dialogue, I am able to use the art to enrich broader understandings of the period, in particular, the ways in which aerial warfare was represented, how this image evolved during the war and how these cultural products related to economic, military and social factors. This thesis highlights the different roles the WAAC was expected to fulfil. Housed within the Ministry of Information, the WAAC was expected to perform a propagandist function. The committee distanced itself from propaganda and insisted that its primary function was to record for posterity the experience of living through the war. I assess exactly what kind of record the WAAC bequeathed by looking thematically at the key aspects of aerial warfare: aircraft production; the Battle of Britain; the Blitz and the bombing of Germany. I argue that whilst there was broad correlation between war art and propaganda, these images registered aspects of experience that were incongruent with and therefore absent from wartime propaganda, such as the fear of aerial bombardment and the true nature of the bombing of Germany. Moreover, propagandist constructions were not entirely separate to lived experience, rather they both reflected experience and shaped the way that individuals understood and made sense of the world around them. Therefore, in producing images that accorded with propagandist portrayals, the WAAC artists were recording a fundamental part of the experience of living through the war.