This study is an investigation into the shifts in ways of knowing which have been subsumed under the label of postmodernism. More specifically, it is concerned to relate theories of Postmodernism to the construction of film as an object of knowledge and to feminism's place in a Modernist/postmodernist divide. Chapter One offers an examination of competing readings of the nature of aesthetic Modernism drawing primarily upon debates on Modernist epistemological legitimation advanced by Jurgen Habermas and Jean-Franicois Lyotard. Chapter Two utilizes Lyotard's notion of Modernism as knowledge legitimated by the grands recits of speculation and emancipation to propose a understanding of the conceptual parameters of avant-garde film Modernism. Chapter Three examines Lyotard's view that postmodernism is acondition of cultural 'incredulity towards metanarratives' by introducing feminist interventions into avant-garde Modernism: it is argued that feminist deconstructionist film plays a crucial role in delegitimating film practices brought under the metanarrative of speculation by challenging the non-gendered mode of spectatorial knowledge claimed for them. Chapter Four extends postmodernist critiques of 'totalizing' discourses to the grand recit of liberty, and advances the view that feminist deconstructiorism, and related psychoanalytical theories of female subjectivity/spectatorship, are in turn delegitimated for instrumentalizing and homogenizing the feminist 'social bond'. Chapter Five considers Lyotard's propositions for a fragmentation of Modernist models of the 'social bond' in relation to his proposal for a theory of resistance defined in terms of 'dissensual paralogy'. Within the context of cultural and technological shifts in contemporary image-culture, the usefulness of a theory of postmodernism which remains embedded within Modernist epistemological differentiations is questioned. A proposal for a theory of film postmodernism which dispenses with the avantgarde/mass culture binary is suggested as a prerequisite for clearing a theoretical space for a politics of resistance which is not founded on instrumentalized and homogeneous spectators. Chapter Six extends this to consider how postmodernist notions of the dissolution of the 'self' and the fragmentation of 'social bond' relate to feminist emancipatory claims. A parallel to the theoretical 'loss' of Modernist foundationalisms; is offered by drawing on black and lesbian perspectives on film spectatorship to argue for theories of film meaning which reflect a multiplicity of modes of spectatorial positioning. The study concludes with an assessment of feminism's place in critiques of totalizing discourses and argues for local contextual rather than metanarrative validations of film as critical discourse.

This thesis examines the appearance of humoral discourse in religious literature disseminated in England in the later medieval period. It employs focused case-studies drawn extensively from manuscripts and early printed sources to demonstrate the transmission of humoral theory in religious circles and how this changed over time, especially with the shift from Latin to the vernacular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By demonstrating the transmission of humoral ideas outside the medical sphere in England in this period, this provides evidence for a ‘medicalization’ of society at this time. However, this study also demonstrates that there was increasingly a ‘Christianization’ of medicine at the same time, evident in the appropriation of humoral discourse in religious literature including sermons, pastoral guides, Rules for religious, works of religious instruction, and devotional and mystical texts.

This study focuses on the notion that adults’ response to children’s literature is profoundly different from that of children, and aims to identify a pattern in texts by which adults’ response can be systematically explained. The study suggests that adults respond to certain elements in the text that resonate with their assumptions about children’s literature. On this basis, the concept of adultness is introduced to refer to these textual elements, and the way in which they can be identified in the narrative is investigated. This study concentrates on literary books, mostly published after 1960, since the issues discussed are more directly relevant to literary works than to popular fiction or classic children’s literature. Brief surveys of historical development of children’s literature and changes in the social perceptions about the relationships between adults and children are undertaken in order to understand the backgrounds of adults’ assumptions about children’s literature. Discussions about adults’ perceptions of children’s literature today are also reviewed. Texts from a wide range of children’s literature are examined within the theoretical framework of narratology with a particular reference to the functions of the narrator. The examination has identified two types of adultness: direct adultness which is largely related to adults’ ideas about childhood, and indirect adultness which is related to adults’ interest in what may be relevant to the child readers of the book. The third type of adultness is termed as Haddon’s ring, which refers to the textual features that are used by authors to keep the narrative safe for child readers. It can be used without losing the narrative integrity or it can be used to manipulate the narrative development. The study concludes that adults’ response could be explained by referring to the three types of adultness. Adultness can be broadly understood in terms of the textual signs that indicate the presence of the mutual understanding between the author and the adult reader on what has been left out from the text and why the author has held it back.

This project sets out to develop a model for a study of difficulty in poetry as systematic and nuanced as possible. In doing so, it endeavours to make a significant theoretical and practical contribution to the fields of stylistics, poetics and literary theory. Throughout the twentieth century, the notion of difficulty in poetry has never ceased to interest linguists, literary theorists, psychologists and researchers in education. The popularity of the notion among non-specialist is equally significant, as it is not uncommon for readers to justify their lack of interest in poetry on the grounds of its supposed difficulty. Notwithstanding this, the dynamics of text-reader interaction – the defining trait of difficulty, as argued in Chapter 1 – remains notably underexplored. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by (a) providing a psychologically plausible and linguistically sound account of difficulty; and by (b) unifying under a coherent framework the insights offered by a large body of materials – from critical readings of literary works to anecdotal evidence, from psychological models of comprehension to controlled psycholinguistic experiments. In terms of methodology, a linguistic, text-based approach is intertwined with an empirical, reader-based one. This combined effort leads to an in-depth analysis of a set of poems from both perspectives (Chapter 3 to 5). Such a qualitative approach allows for the identification of textual and readerly components typical of difficulty. On the textual side, I identify twenty-four features, called linguistic indicators of difficulty and affecting all the linguistic levels – graphology, syntax, lexis, semantics and text structure. Based on scholarly remarks and experimental evidence, these indicators are likely to hamper readers’ comprehension and thus increase the processing effort they require. These two main readerly dimensions of difficulty I qualify as online (i.e. affecting the processing effort in actual reading) and offline (i.e. affecting the post-reading understanding of a poem). In turn, online and offline difficulty are cued by observable readerly behaviours (e.g. interpretive uncertainty, slowed-down reading, statements of rejection) that are explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall, difficulty is viewed as a response phenomenon that has a strong linguistic motivation. For reasons of focus and critical consistency, the model is applied to twentieth and twentieth-first century Anglo-American poems only. This temporal restriction acknowledges the critically established connection between difficulty and modernism (e.g. Adams 1991, Adamson 1999, Diepeveen 2003). The case studies from Chapter 3 to 5 focus on Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Susan Howe and Jeremy H. Prynne as representing different aspects of difficulty. Chapter 6 extends this purview to a larger corpus, featuring Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. All these poets have been deemed ‘difficult’ by other critics, so the corpus rests on an intersubjective agreement that was missing in previous accounts. The hope is that the model proposed will be fruitfully extended and applied to non-Anglo-American literary traditions as well as to poetry written in earlier centuries.

This thesis examines representations of space, place and landscape in English and German-language poetry of the period 1960-1975, a key transitional phase between modernity and postmodernity. It proposes that the impact certain transnational spatial revolutions had on contemporary poetry can only be fully grasped with recourse to comparative methodologies which look across national borders. This is demonstrated by a series of paired case studies which examine the work of J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan, Sarah Kirsch and Derek Mahon, and Ernst Jandl and Edwin Morgan. Prynne and Celan’s 'Sprachskepsis' is the starting point for a post-structuralist analysis of meta-textual space in their work, including how poetry’s complex tectonics addresses multifaceted crises of representation. Mahon and Kirsch’s work is read in the context of spatial division, and it is argued that both use representations of landscape, space and place to express political engagement, and to negotiate fraught ideas of home, community and world. Jandl and Morgan’s representations of space and place, which often depend on experimental lyric subjectivity, are examined: it is argued that poetic subject(s) which speak from multiple perspectives (or none) serve as a means of reconfiguring poetry’s relationship to space at a time when social, literary and political boundaries were being redefined. The thesis thus highlights hitherto underexplored connections between a range of poets working across the two language areas, making clear that space and place is a vital critical category for understanding poetry of this period, including both experimental and non-experimental work. It reveals weaknesses in existing critical taxonomies, arguing for the use of ‘late modernist’ as category with cross-cultural relevance, and promotes methodological exchange between the Anglophone and German traditions of landscape, space and place-oriented poetry scholarship, to the benefit of both.

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin presents us both with a theory of carnival, and with an account of the historical decline of the carnivalesque since the Renaissance. This thesis uses Bakhtin's work as a point of departure for an analysis of particular moments in the history of post-Renaissance comic theory. It is argued both Bakhtin's account of carnivalesque decline provides us with a potent framework within which to perform such an analysis, and that this in turn facilitates a thorough interrogation of, and engagement with, Bakhtin's theory of carnival. Chapter One outlines Bakhtin's theory, identifying its historical and utopian dimensions, and exploring some of the problems which it generates. Chapter Two addresses some of the methodological issues relating to a historical analysis of comic theory, and situates Bakhtin's theory of carnival in relation to recent work in the area of comic theory. The remaining chapters focus on particular comic theory texts in the light of Bakhtin's thesis. Chapter Three contrasts Kant's analysis of humour with Schopenhauer's theory, relating the former to its Enlightenment context and the latter to its Romantic context. Chapter Four explores Bergson's discussion of laughter, situating it in relation to modernism, while Chapter Five reviews Freud's theory of jokes, examining the proximity between the structures of carnival and the structures of the Freudian joke. Chapter Six focuses on a Brechtian theory of comedy, assessing its relationship with the carnivalesque tradition, while Chapter Seven attempts to update Bakhtin's thesis in relation to contemporary configurations by exploring recent arguments concerning the comic credentials of postmodern culture. It is argued in conclusion that, if post-Renaissance culture has witnessed a decline in the significance of the carnivalesque, then the trajectory of that decline has undergone' a complex series of historical shifts and reversals.

This thesis develops a cognitively grounded framework which operationalises the concept of intertextuality, facilitating linguistic analysis of the role it can play in readers’ responses to, interpretations of, and discussions about, texts. The thesis demonstrates the application of this ‘narrative interrelation framework’ in two contexts: the adult reading group and the secondary school English classroom. In doing so, the thesis reflects on the forms, functions and utility of intertextual booktalk, and explores why intertextuality may manifest differently in different environments. The research symbiotically unites the fields of education research and cognitive linguistics, advancing our understanding of reading and studying fiction in secondary schools in England. The thesis aims in particular to contribute to our understanding of the use of the ‘class reader’ - reading a set text as a group - which remains the most prevalent model of reading fiction with students, both in England and internationally. Class reader units are explored along two key dimensions: conceptualising students and teachers as readers, and considering the classroom as a type of reading space. The first part of this research focuses on understanding and mapping cognition processes which underlie intertextuality, both in terms of how readers make intertextual links between stories as well how they process, understand and engage with the intertextual references they encounter. The second part of this research considers the classroom environment in contrast to another site where readers gather to discuss a text: the reading group. A contrastive analysis of these two environments looks to understand the nature of the reading experience in the classroom and, in particular, how it affects the links students make between stories. A final part of the thesis will reflect on the aspects of reading and booktalk which are facilitated or inhibited in different discourse environments. Ultimately, the thesis characterises the nature of the ‘class reader’ experience and considers the implications this has for pedagogy, for engagement and for our understanding of what class readers are intended to, and what they do, achieve as a core staple of the English curriculum. The research examines two datasets representing two distinct types of reading experience of the same two novels: Holes by Louis Sachar (1999) and Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945). The first is a 320,000 word corpus of English lesson transcripts comprising two complete ‘class reader’ schemes of work: a Year 7 mixed ability group studying Holes and a Year 9 top set group studying Animal Farm. The second 40,000 word corpus captures two sessions of an adult reading group, made up predominantly of English graduates, meeting to discuss the same two texts.