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<p>Old English literary studies is a fascinating field of research which spans many various approaches including philology and linguistics as well as literary and cultural theories. The field is characterised by a certain conservatism, what in this thesis is referred to as tradition. This thesis examines the scholarship on The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, projecting its cumbersome affinities with tradition as a conservative force as well as the resistance against it. The investigation focuses mainly on two aspects of scholarly research: the emergence of a professional identity among Anglo-Saxonist scholars and their choice of either a metaphoric or metonymic approach to the material. A final chapter studies the concomitant changes within Old English feminist studies. The thesis also summarises the approaches to points of ambiguity in the poems, and provides a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on the two texts.</p>

Old English literary studies is a fascinating field of research which spans many various approaches including philology and linguistics as well as literary and cultural theories. The field is characterised by a certain conservatism, what in this thesis is referred to as tradition. This thesis examines the scholarship on The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, projecting its cumbersome affinities with tradition as a conservative force as well as the resistance against it. The investigation focuses mainly on two aspects of scholarly research: the emergence of a professional identity among Anglo-Saxonist scholars and their choice of either a metaphoric or metonymic approach to the material. A final chapter studies the concomitant changes within Old English feminist studies. The thesis also summarises the approaches to points of ambiguity in the poems, and provides a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on the two texts.

The Old English Apollonius of Tyre survives as only a fragment of a popular medieval romance which is recorded in numerous Latin manuscripts. Approximately half the story is missing; therefore, studies of this prose romance are usually restricted to linguistic and stylistic analyses. Hence this study focuses on the word order of phrases and clauses and on features of style apparent in the Old English version, with comparison to the Latin source where significant divergences occur.

It is widely accepted that Old English personal pronouns often turn up in ‘special’ positions, i.e. positions in which functionally equivalent nominals rarely, if ever, appear. Leading theories of Old English syntax (e.g. van Kemenade 1987, Pintzuk 1991, 1996, Hulk & van Kemenade 1997, Kroch & Taylor 1997) account for the syntax of specially placed pronouns in different ways, but all treat special placement as a freely available option. Focusing on pronominal objects of prepositions in particular, this thesis shows, firstly, that current theories fail to account for the variety of special positions in which these pronouns appear and argues that at least three special positions must be recognised. The central concern of this thesis, however, is whether special placement is the freely available option that leading theories assume. Drawing on evidence from a number of descriptive studies of the syntax of pronominal objects of prepositions (e.g. Wende 1915, Taylor 2008, Alcorn 2009), statistical evidence is presented to show that, in a number of contexts, the probability of special placement is either too high or else too low to be plausibly ascribed to free variation. The thesis explores the linguistic basis of each of the statistically significant parameters identified, finding answers in some cases and intriguing puzzles in others.

This qualitative case study explores the language learning experiences of a sample of Gujarati women in London and uses tools of qualitative inquiry including 20 semi-structured interviews, two focus groups, observation and document analysis. The process of learning English as a second language is explored through an intersectional lens that takes account of gender, race and class and the corresponding identity constructions of Gujarati women. An inability to speak English for these women is further complicated by inequities brought about by classed structures, private/public patriarchy and processes of ‘othering’ for migrant women. This study is situated during a period of both rising nationalistic ideas in the UK, and during a precise moment of cultural nationalism in South Asia which is framed by concerns with race, ethnicity, class and gender which informs the formation of British-Asian femininities. This research supports other work that conceptualises identity as being in a constant state of flux, which is made explicitly visible within language learning processes that highlight identity as socially constructed, contradictory, and fluid. The poststructuralist conception of social identity as multiple, as a site of struggle, and subject to change is forms the basis of the theoretical framework. The concept of ‘investment' is employed to describe immigrant women’s involvement in language learning processes. The findings suggest implications for immigrant language training policies and further research. While the women interviewed in this research experience ‘race’ and patriarchy along class lines, they also face a dilemma of balancing their personal lives and protecting themselves from the ‘corrupting Western’ culture through imposed cultural definitions which might result in them taking up an ‘oppressed’ South Asian femininity. However, with time and age, the women’s subjectivities are reworked through acts of resistance, and examples of subtle manipulation which manifest as expressions of opposition as they perform an appreciation of ‘their own culture’ while simultaneously appropriating white spaces. Here, through this appropriation, the respondents construct ‘resistant identities’ and define a new ‘third space’. The dichotomies between East and West and tradition and modernity dissipate as the women’s agency allows them the actual construction of their identities as they go on learning English and changing their lives. These women’s oral histories speak of the gendered and sexualized discourses of assimilation, racism, and ‘otherness’, as well as other multiple points in which they break down. The conceptual insights gained from studying these Gujarati women are plentiful.

This thesis explores male and female identity in Old Norse and British iterations of the Völsung legend, focusing on the Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga, William Morris's The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, and Melvin Burgess’s Bloodtide and Bloodsong. Using poststructuralist theories of gender and posthumanism to analyse representations of gender in these texts, it argues that, in the Old Norse versions of this legend, female identity is closely connected to the control of representations of narrative events, whereas male identity is subject to this control but becomes more overtly fluid in the depiction of shape-shifting. The thesis goes beyond previous critical analyses of gender in these texts which observe an active/ passive binary, or focus on female monstrosity and lament, and male heroism. Unlike most examinations of adaptations of this legend which focus on the medieval or Victorian material, this thesis provides a detailed exploration of The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs in conjunction with its Old Norse sources. In doing so, it establishes the silencing of female characters by Morris's rewriting, and the foregrounding of male identity through a focus on the body, performance and the built environment. This thesis also considers both the Old Norse texts and Morris's poem alongside later, critically neglected, British versions of the legend to explore the ways in which narrative form influences the representation of the multiplicity of gender in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, and the importance of a posthuman conception of identity in Bloodtide and Bloodsong. The thesis argues that the Old Norse sources do not stand aside from their later interpretations as something complete and originary, but are themselves supplemented by the rewritings of Morris, Tolkien and Burgess; it is, therefore, necessary to foreground our knowledge of all these iterations of the narrative to offer a fuller understanding of gender in the Old Norse Völsung legend and its British rewritings.

This thesis analyses Anglo-Saxon conceptions of craftsmanship, and provides new interpretations for the notions of searo, orþonc and cræft in Old English literature. I argue that the texts discussing craftsmanship and craftsmen subscribe to an atemporal myth. This myth is not so much that of Weland the smith of Germanic lore, but rather a myth of the inculpating and redemptive power of craftsmanship, after a fall-and-salvation pattern. I show that, on the level of semantics, mirroring the above pattern, there are concurrent shifts in the meanings of two of the main terms for craftsmanship, and that notably searo is subject to pejoration in the process of transition from a poetic to a prose term, while cræft, on the other hand, witnesses a number of semantic changes to make it a versatile and uniquely positive expression of craftsmanship. Whereas orþanc is a neutral notion of craftsmanship that is bound to a concrete genre before being recast in the close environment of bishop Æthelwold‟s circle at Winchester in the tenth century, the semantic shifts in searo and cræft are testimony to broad cultural shifts in the representations of craftsmanship and in perceptions of the craftsman. The point of departure in Chapter One is with the artisans themselves, the craftsmen and skilled metalworkers – the actual makers of em>searo, orþonc and cræft. Taking the smith as the archetypal craftsman, I examine the manner in which this artisan-artist is depicted in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. I argue that two strands can be distinguished, one depicting the craftsman as reprobate, and another exalting him. In subsequent chapters, semantic studies and new readings of three notions of craftsmanship illuminate the intricate ways in which these two strands interact across time, genre and medium of expression. In Chapter Two, searo is examined within the semantic field of binding to show that it represents a traditional expression of superlative craftsmanship associated primarily with the smith, and denoting status and quality in verse. In its pejoration as a notion of scheming and deceit, it retains its strong association with binding and becomes a mechanism for redemption by connecting with the Harrowing of Hell tradition. Chapter Three shows how orþanc evolves from a poetic term denoting ancient craftsmanship into an abstract notion of ingenuity, by charting its existence in the gloss corpus and relating it to the glossing of mechanica in later Anglo-Saxon England. It emerges as a hermeneutic term characterised by moral neutrality, with close connections to the Benedictine Reform movement. Chapter Four is the first segment of a two-part examination of cræft as a notion of craftsmanship. After evaluating the body of existing critical material, I assess our understanding of the term's polysemy before analysing its use as a concrete but somewhat antiquated notion of magical craftsmanship. Chapter Five provides an in-depth assessment of an alternative, much more widespread, Christianized usage of cræft as a notion of divine endowment. It shows how this notion is instrumental in several highly positive assessments of smiths analysed in Chapter One, and argues that it provides a platform for other craftsmen to distinguish themselves in a religious, orthodox way. In my conclusion, I show that the new readings of these notions are key to interpreting metaphors of poetic creation and creativity as used by authors such as Cynewulf.

This thesis looks at a selection of novels by diasporic writers which engage significantly with the domestic sphere and its associated practices in their narratives of migration to Britain from postcolonial spaces. Employing a feminist postcolonial approach to works by Buchi Emecheta, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Leila Aboulela, this thesis challenges dominant readings of migration fiction that have been shaped by postmodern and diasporic frameworks of displacement and rupture, emphasising instead placement, dwelling and (re)rooting as important features of the migratory process. It also aims to re-centre the domestic, private and ‘everyday’ in conceptions of home in current debates about migration, while also generating a productive theorisation of 'home' which synthesises its feminist and postcolonial critiques. My approach is about reading more than the allegorical into literary representations of home-spaces, as I trace the interdependence of public and private, domestic and political, across both form and content in the novels covered. Through my analysis of individual texts, I show how writers draw on the colonial and postcolonial politics of home and domesticity as discursive resources in their narratives of cross-cultural encounter, challenging the devaluation of the private sphere as a static, unproductive and uncreative space. I unpack how these texts engage with the domestic as a material space of inspiration, but also as a political space constructed by histories of colonialism and immigration, as well as by policy and academic scholarship, showing how they respond to and subvert these discourses. Through their engagement with familiar tropes of house and home, many of these works challenge representations of migrant women as passive recipients and reproducers of an externally defined ‘culture’. Instead, I argue, they offer alternative interior geographies which re-map both the British domestic space and that of the home-culture, reframing the home as an important carrier of meaning but one that is constantly in flux, remaking itself according to the needs and desires of those who dwell within its walls.

Thesis advisor: Robert Stanton / This dissertation introduces the remix as an interpretive framework for the analysis of medieval texts and demonstrates its value as a new approach to understanding even well-studied texts. Breaking the process of remixing down into three composite processes—aggregation, compilation, and renarration—allows the reader to examine a given text as the cumulative effect of a series of actions taken by known or unknown remixers. Doing so in turn allows for new readings based on previously un- or under-explored alterations, completions, and juxtapositions present within the text or its physical or generic contexts, or embedded within its processes of textual production. This dissertation presents four case studies that show the usefulness of this approach in regard to (1) the physical and textual construction of the Junius manuscript; (2) the conventions of the ‘encomium urbis’ genre and the meaning of ‘home’ in Old English poetry; (3) King Leir narratives and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as forms of history writing; and (4) various contextualizations of Grendel, the antagonist from the poem Beowulf. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.