'Half' is a dual narrative following the stories of sisters Sadie and Hannah on a less than harmonious trip round the Western States of America, and Olive Oatman, a fourteen-year-old girl captured by Native Americans in 1851. Olive’s account of servitude and acculturation with the Mohave Indians is in fact the fictionalisation of a memoir, told through a journal Sadie acquires. While the modern narrative in 'Half' is also based extensively on biographical content, the resulting novel is most definitely fiction. The accompanying research explores the point at which memoir and fiction intersect, asking if there is ever absolute truth or absolute fiction when utilising one’s own experiences as a framework for a narrative. Using evidence from historians it examines the extent to which the key texts discussed in the Thesis, classified as Memoir or Fiction, can be seen to occupy the middle ground between both tropes. It also looks at how the novel 'Half' incorporates a complex range of personal experience and imaginative explorations through its key themes of otherness, sisterly relationships and the role of fathers – and how the two narrative strands dovetail in both obvious and unpredictable ways to express the dark subtext of the novel.

This thesis is for ‘literature from below’. I select three groups of poor people –petty criminals, prostitutes, and apprentices –and investigate their dramatic representation in three early modern plays –The Roaring Girl, The Honest Whore, and Sir Thomas More. To overcome their representational distortion, I carry out a tripartite dialogue between documentational evidence, dramatic allusion and poetic imagination. This thesis adopts its methodology from poststructuralist historicism, but my theoretical position on Renaissance studies diverges from it in several respects, which I elucidate in the introduction. The first chapter ascertains, by scrutinizing the hermaphroditic protagonist Moll, that her cross-dressing and protean identities represent the characteristics of early modern London. The second chapter argues that early modern capitalism combined with patriarchy plays a crucial role in giving rise to prostitution by examining the courtesan protagonist, Bellafront. The third chapter, which analyzes the 1517 Ill May Day apprentice riots in the context of the 1590s London crisis, traces there presentational history of the popular insurgency and retrieves ideological implication from the early modern censorial regime. In the conclusion, I estimate ‘use value’ of Renaissance drama in our time, and from the Marxist perspective, I appraise the aesthetic appeal of the three plays.

This thesis investigates competing representations of androgyny as grotesque and/or divine in selected works by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. The literary grotesque is a combination of incompatibles—such as the combination of masculine and feminine—which evokes simultaneous reactions of laughter and revulsion, while I define the divine as that which inspires awe and wonder through its otherworldliness. Throughout, the thesis examines figures such as physical or metaphorical hermaphrodites, eunuchs, Amazons, transvestites, the asexual, the pansexual, and those who transgress gender boundaries. The Introduction establishes historical contexts for physical and behavioural androgyny, the grotesque, and the divine. Each subsequent chapter close-reads one literary text: Chapter 1 examines place-based androgyny in Jonson’s Volpone; Chapter 2 explores Antonio/Florizel’s effect in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida; Chapter 3 analyses role-reversal in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; Chapter 4 investigates Ganymede’s magnetism and Rosalind’s wondrousness in As You Like It; and Chapter 5 evaluates Cesario’s invigoration in Twelfth Night. I argue for a progression in the degree of wonder evoked by androgynous figures, and an increase in these figures’ subjectivity and agency. My thesis is the first to explore the liberating unfixity of androgyny as funny, frightening, repulsive, and yet also potentially divine.

Oswald’s Book of Hours and Englaland (OBOH&E — Smokestack Books, 2013 & 2015 respectively) are distinctive works in the context of modern and contemporary English language poetry. Although there are affinities between OBOH&E and several modern and contemporary works, OBOH&E’s visionary engagement with concepts of England and English identity, their epic expression and novel post-pastoral dimension combine to make them unique. The works’ address to England and the English emerges from an ecologically committed, broadly socialist position informed by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as ‘imagined community’ and Patrick Kavanagh’s assertion of the primacy of the ‘parochial’, coalescing into a literary-political position defined by my coinage utopian yeoman-anarchism. The epic dimension of OBOH&E is demonstrated in an exposition based on the theoretical writings of Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and M.M. Bakhtin. OBOH&E’s characteristic dialogical method — defined by the synchronic and synoptic temporal aspect of the works and their deployments of heteroglossia, polyphony and xenoglossia — leads to a characterisation of the books as novelistic ‘modern epics’. Finally, in an analysis informed by Terry Gifford’s influential taxonomy, OBOH&E is identified as a distinctive subgenre of the post-pastoral (another coinage) — the guerrillapastoral. The guerrilla-pastoral arises from the transgressive rural praxis of the author and is reflected and expressed via his personae, narrators and protagonists as they assert their rights in the land, in conflict with representatives of the power that seeks to restrict and deny them.

Since language is an important means of communication between human beings, it is held that writers or speakers can affect their readers or hearers by using certain linguistic means. The manipulation of semantics and syntax, namely the use of emotive language, is seen as an affective means resorted to by text producers to influence the people's acceptance of the truth. Emotional language aims ultimately at persuading the addressee to accept the facts as they are presented by writers. It is regarded as a necessary condition for persuasion to be successful. This is due to the persuasive force of emotive meaning exerted upon the receiver. In addition, the employment of emotive language may be attributed to ideological considerations. This will be demonstrated in Chapter II. Emotiveness, as a means of persuasion, can be expressed by using certain devices such as repetition, intertextuality, word-order, figures of speech, intensifiers ... etc. These strategies will be discussed in detail with reference to translation in Chapter III. Furthermore, I must say that some of my remarks have been based on the findings of outstanding grammarians and linguists, and therefore, I have been obliged to quote from such works to substantiate my points of view. Before proceeding with the investigation, I must point out that the entire data of my work will be confined only to news reports and editorials both in Arabic and English, and for this end a number of articles have been used from official newspapers in both languages.

This thesis focuses on epistolary theory in early modern England. There are a few studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean letter-writing manuals to date, though scholars typically use chronological analyses of instructional texts printed between 1568-1640. However, the methodology of this dissertation departs considerably from earlier studies. Rather than study many texts chronologically, I focus on one: Angel Day’s The English Secretary. Day’s manual, printed nine times in fifty years, was the most popular of its time. I use these editions– many of them heavily revised – to trace developments of epistolary theory. This approach necessitates a two-part methodology: bibliographical analysis and textual criticism. Before examining The English Secretary as a letter-writing text, I take up the manual, and its nine editions, using principles of bibliography to locate the revisions that Day made to his manual. Once I locate his revisions, I use textual analysis to determine their signification. In so doing, I reappraise the critical consensus about Day’s manual. It reveals that Day, typically cast as a proto-epistolary novelist or pre-Richardson Richardson, did not write as a literary author. Rather, he wrote in turns as a government servant and professional – the approved roles of a writer in Elizabethan literary culture. This newly informs the purpose of Day’s manual, as well as epistolary theory: letter-writing instruction at this time did not preview the emergence of the epistolary novel but maintained a civic, professional, and social function in early modern England.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how the virtual image of Brazil and its literature is constructed in the Anglo-American world. To this end, a survey of Brazilian literary works in English translation was carried out. Having gathered this data, it became possible to establish correlations between the historical moments when such translations were made, when their number increased, and the events occurring at those times in the international panorama, as well as to look into the role of sponsors, publishers and translators in the selection and production of such translations. The data also allowed a profile of Brazilian literary works in English translation to be drawn. It became possible to suggest that such works fall into four main categories: `authorial works', 'topical works', `ambassadorial works' and `consumer-oriented works'. In order to look more closely into how the translation process has helped to shape the virtual image of Brazilian literary works in the Anglo-American world, an analysis of a sample of translations of such works was made. Included in this sample were the translations of works by Machado de Asis, by Indianist and Regionalist wirters, culminating in an examination of translations of GuimarAes Rosa's works. Having looked at these aspects of the translation process, what remained to be done was to investigate to what extent Brazilian literary works in English translation are read by the English- speaking public. To this end, a survey of availability and library readership was undertaken. Finally, a reading experiment was carried out in which native speakers of English were asked to read the short story 'A terceira margem do rio', by GuimarAes Rosa. The conclusion attempts to pull all these threads together and to indicate directions for further research.

This thesis builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature, film and television to explore how the stylistic features of comic novels and short stories may shape readers’ experience of comedy. I suggest that our responses to written humorous narratives are triggered by two types of stylistic cue: those which lead to amusement and stabilise our experience of comedy, and those which destabilise it by evoking non-humorous emotions associated with experiencing narrative worlds generally. When presented simultaneously, those cues can trigger complex humorous responses in which amusement is experienced alongside other, often negative, emotions. In order to investigate how textual elements can influence our emotional experience of humorous narratives, this thesis examines the ways in which stylistic cues affect some of the main experiential features of the narrative worlds of comedy: the moods evoked by the world, our relationships with characters, and our reactions to plot events. Following on from the Introduction and the Literature Review (Chapters 1 and 2), Chapter 3 explores the ways in which stylistic cues may evoke various moods by establishing, reinforcing and disrupting our expectations. Chapter 4 focuses on the role of characterisation in humorous narratives, concentrating on those cues which encourage us to laugh at narrative characters, and those which evoke other, non-humorous responses to them. In Chapter 5, I consider how the presentation of story events affects our experience of humorous plots. I discuss the cues which add humour to the presentation of otherwise problematic events, as well as those which combine humour with more uncomfortable emotions that stem from our reactions to story structures. Chapter 6, finally, provides a summary of the argument and of the contribution to knowledge made by this thesis. My exploration of the non-humorous side of experiencing narrative comedy offers a key contribution to the study of humorous narratives. By investigating humour as part of a wider narrative world, this thesis moves beyond the analysis of amusing language and towards addressing the complexity of the creation and experience of humour in a narrative world. The interdisciplinary, stylistic-psychological approach adopted here allows for hypotheses to be made not only about the emotional experience of humour in comic novels and short stories, but also about the affective side of narrative comprehension more generally.

This thesis considers the works of six major literary figures in the context of their engagement with the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. These writers are, in order of analysis, Edwin Morgan, J.K. Rowling, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, Kathleen Jamie, and John Burnside. Each has produced a significant literary oeuvre which is examined here in relation to each other's work and to the Referendum debate. The multifaceted relationship between literature and politics is investigated through the lens of the Referendum, utilising these six figures as interrelated case studies. Chapter One explores Edwin Morgan and J.K. Rowling in relation to each other and the concept of nationalism as manifested in the Referendum period. Chapter Two focuses on postcolonialism and the work of Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead in that same context. The third and final chapter is concerned with Kathleen Jamie's and John Burnside's preoccupation with ecopoetics, and how that concern overlapped with Referendum discourse. This thesis provides new readings of these six writers in the context of the Referendum. It sets out to establish that, while their published literary works are often connected to the spectrum of stances these writers took regarding the Referendum, these works need to be considered with respect to the nuanced attention all six had previously given to key themes of the Referendum debate in the decades leading up to that political moment.

This doctoral project explores the narrative representations of transforming subjectivity in modernist and post-modernist texts that deploy the trope of metamorphosis. Subjectivity is explored within a psychoanalytic framework and from a comparative lens, through the juxtaposition of selected short stories and novels of metamorphosis from different literatures, produced in different languages and under different geocultural and historico-political conditions from 1915 to 1996. Chapter One explores subjectivity as sacrificial and in conflict with a symbolic father-authority, through a close reading of insect metamorphosis in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915) and Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Aurelian” (1931). Chapter Two addresses the postcolonial dimension of subjectivity and its collective construction in terms of the loss of home in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949) and Vassilis Vassilikos’s ... and dreams are dreams (1988). Chapter Three pairs two feminist writers and their stories of metamorphoses, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation (1996), to explore subjectivity as hybrid: androgynous and human-animal like. Metamorphosis, as this project suggests, allows us to explore an array of subjectivities, both individual and collective: it points to the issues of death, rebirth, sacrifice, the subject’s position within a nation and the processes of nation-formation, and creative writing as negotiating loss, while it also challenges the established boundaries of gender and animal representation. This thesis argues that the twentieth-century stories of metamorphosis which are being examined here articulate a certain metamorphosis in our very conception of subjectivity, namely, the reconceptualization of subjectivity as hybrid, metamorphic, and bound to individual and collective transformations.