This thesis explores the relationship between the avant-garde and humour during two critical historical periods: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the early years of the Cuban Revolution (1959-1961). It focuses on those authors and magazines which persisted with the avant-garde approach despite the highly politicized climate. Some of them combined political compromise with the avant-garde. Others prioritised the avant-garde solely. The main object of study is comics oriented to an adult audience published in periodicals, clandestine magazines and, especially, the so called revista de trincheras during the Spanish Civil War. The medium, graphic narrative, helped to overcome literacy problems, while humour served as a communicative bridge to better spread the intended messages. In Cuba, the first two years of the Revolution were an ongoing process of defining a new political, cultural and social system. Graphic humour played a significant role in that task, further developing an already very rich national tradition. In that process of consolidation, the experimental humour magazine El Pitirre, very much under the umbrella of Lunes de Revolucion, approached humour as a liminal space, a space of conflict and instability with a universal drive, from existentialism to criticism of Imperialism, formally renovating graphic humour in Cuba by using a minimal but expressive line.

This thesis examines the educational role of English literature in Taiwan and proposes a method of reading and teaching English Renaissance poetry for Taiwanese students and teachers. Based upon the idea of integrating literature and language, this thesis suggests a stylistic approach to reading as well as interpreting literary texts. The thesis will argue that the prevalent communicational features of Renaissance poetry will, during the reading process, allow Taiwanese students to explore the interaction between the poetic speaker and the addressee before considering the relationship between the poet and the reader. Thus, as a reader of Renaissance poetry, the student can carry out an individual communication with the text. This proposed method for teachers of Renaissance poetry in Taiwan is predicated on a selection of "manageable" texts which should enable students to understand the use of language before they embark on further interpretation. Within the thesis there will be examples of various text analyses that are intended to guide students in constructing their own reading strategies. This, in turn, will lead to a broader interpretation of text and context. By demonstrating the accessibility of the proposed reading and teaching method, this thesis aims to promote a pedagogical development for both the teaching of a specific genre and for other types of literary texts encountered in the classroom.

Conceptualisations of modern literary history are premised upon a series of dynastic successions, whereby one is able to trace, albeit simplistically, the evolution of the novel through its realist, modernist and postmodernist manifestations. Considered in this linear manner, the emergence of altered cultural movements is ordinarily attributed to a crisis within the former mood; as society ruptures and alters, existing modes of representation prove inadequate to reflect, or else engage with, the emergent structure of feeling. As an event with far-reaching implications, many critics and cultural commentators have attributed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with the inception of an altered global mood. Moreover, in the days and weeks following 9/11, the publication of a number of articles penned by authors emphasised the extent to which the event had precipitated a profound crisis in representation. As an ever greater number of articles and studies emerged proclaiming the final death knell of postmodernism and the emergence of a more anxious global mood, so the myth of 9/11 quickly developed. The thesis rests upon a very simple question: to what extent has 9/11 precipitated a change in the novel? Through examining a wide range of fictions published largely within Britain in the last fifteen years, the study explores and ultimately dispels the assumptions of the myth. Rather than examining the fictional representation of 9/11, the study’s focus is on assessing the significance of the novel after the event, and moreover on interrogating the manner in which the terrorist attacks might have engendered a shift in the contemporary mood that is reflected in the subsequent novels published. Through emphasising the novelistic concerns and themes that transcend the assumed cultural rift, the thesis proposes that the ‘post-9/11 mood’ might more usefully be interpreted as an exacerbation of an already existing structure of feeling that responds to the banal superficiality of the postmodern condition.

This thesis considers literary and critical reverberations of environment and place in order to reframe conceptions of what nature might mean for contemporary poetry. It attends to the timeframe of 1990 – present, assessing how developments in socio-political context and critical thought correspond or conflict with poetic responses. The interdisciplinary reach of the thesis brings together literary geography and ecocriticism, both of which established their roots during this period, putting conventional understandings of place and environment under pressure. The approach encourages a geographical attention to socio-cultural concerns whilst maintaining critical awareness of recent ecocritical focus on materiality, emphasising the potentially productive friction between cultural representation and physical reality. The thesis responds to earlier Romantic paradigms, granting marginalised contemporary poetry a stronger critical agency whilst still accepting the transformations and metamorphoses of literary convention. Taking a thematic approach, each chapter engages with key binaries found in environmental and geographical thinking to reveal how contemporary poetics unsettle and challenge such dualisms. The study looks at the work of twelve writers: Thomas A. Clark, John Burnside, Alec Finlay, Roy Fisher, Philip Gross, Barry MacSweeney, Robert Minhinnick, Alice Oswald, Frances Presley, Jo Shapcott and Zoë Skoulding. As a result, it compares and contrasts the poets’ engagements with the key threads in the thesis, suggesting that contemporary poetry of place and environment is united through its recognition of the paradox or gap between the material world and linguistic representation. Ultimately, the thesis concludes that contemporary poetry of environment and place is deliberately unstable, as it metamorphoses forms, modes and legacies, encouraging an understanding of such work as simultaneously responsive to and yet distinct from conventional paradigms of nature poetry.