This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between the understanding of the past and the practice of theology. It is built around three major case studies: the history of interpretation of the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17-19), the commemoration of the First World War in Canada, and the development of post-Holocaust theology. Linking these cases are issues of theological response to (or justification for) violence, and tensions between individual and collective identity. Part I focuses on Deuteronomy 25:17-19, and the internal contradiction between the commandments to remember and blot out the memory of Amalek. The passage is analysed both in terms of language and reception history, with special attention paid to Rabbinic interpretations from the 19th and 20th centuries (sermons and commentaries generated during or immediately after the German Reform movement, the American Civil War, and the Nazi occupation of Poland). This reading prompts two further strands of analysis, which are pursued separately: the distinction between the remembering commanded in the passage and concepts of memory active in the Western philosophical tradition prior to the 20th century, and the place this passage has in a larger tradition of religious and secular discourse on acceptable justifications for violence, again in both Jewish and more broadly Western thought. Part II takes up these themes, beginning with an historically contextualised reading of two versions of Antigone—one written by Sophocles in the early days of the Athenian Empire, and the other by Jean Anouilh during the Second World War. Both of these focus on a dead body as the site of ideological contestation between divergent identity narratives—a conflict that is also apparent in negotiations over the memorialisation of the First World War, which is the main focus of this part. A close reading of novels from L. M. Montgomery‘s Anne of Green Gables series, published before, during, and just after the war reveals that the First World War partly destabilised the individual-focused structures of memorialisation that were in place prior to its beginning, in favour of structures which enforced the collective identity of the soldiers who died in the war; while much of this instability could be (and was) addressed in existing theological language, the war nevertheless left a mark on Canadian society and religious practice. This part concludes with an examination of the Canadian National Monument at Vimy, conducted via archival documentation of the monument‘s design and construction and then through a reading of The Stone Carvers, a recent novel which re-imagines the circumstances documented in the archives through the eyes of one war veteran and his family. This dual reading also demonstrates the instability of memorials, the tendency of their meaning to shift over time. Part III commences with a discussion of the shift in memorial forms precipitated by the Holocaust. I contend that the tendency to memorialise the Holocaust with complex museum narratives betrays an anxiety about the intended audience of these memorials, which points in turn to the degree to which the Holocaust upset previous cultural and religious worldviews. This section focuses on theological and literary attempts to record and respond to the ruptures caused by the Holocaust, with specific reference to two recent novels by Jewish Candian women which, taken together, provide a constructive interruption to overly tidy narratives of national and religious identity.

The figure of the grandmother is a rhythm which repeats itself throughout Caribbean literature. The Caribbean literary grandmother owes a great deal to a history of hardship under slavery and post-emancipation struggles for self-realisation and empowerment. This thesis explores the repeating theme of theme of the grandmother-headed-household in literary works from Guadeloupe to Jamaica. The novels of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Joseph Zobel, Cecil Foster, Zee Edgell, Alvin Bennett, Cristina Garcia and Pablo Medina are interrogated in this space to reveal the importance of the grandmother character as the backbone of the works. Other novels from the region will also be utilised as secondary texts to further demonstrate the timeless nature of the grandmother's primary role in cultural retention and in the writer's imagination. Social-history provides an invaluable backdrop for understanding some of the dynamics involved in the West Indian family relationship and family structure. Theories as produced by theorists from within the region will be drawn upon alongside theories produced outside the Caribbean. These theories are included because they allow for a culturally distinct reading of Antillian literature that does not imprison the subject as reductionist, Eurocentric theory does. The combination of these theories , will thereby allow the importance of the grandmother character to come through, not as a dysfunctional copy of European models, but rather as a character constructed within a unique cultural contexts on distinct cultural codes. The premise of this thesis is the deconstruction of boundaries by highlighting the repeating grandmother rhythm. The established barriers serve to segregate works into groups based on language, nationality, gender, and ethnicity. Therefore, reading along the restrictive lines established by the latter has disallowed the rich understanding that an interdisciplinary study which crosses genre, gender, and lines of ethnicity reveals.

The thesis sets out to examine the little studied phenomenon of translating and rewriting children’s literature during Fascism. Under Mussolini’s rule, books for children had to perform the important task of forging the ‘new Italians’. For this reason, the presence of foreign literature on the Italian book market became increasingly problematic, as the regime attempted to achieve cultural and economic autarchy. This research aims to show how, rather than merely reflecting dominant ideologies, the translation of books for children was a site for negotiation, allowing different, and sometimes conflicting narratives and discourses to be identified and fruitfully examined. By adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, where theories from Translation Studies, Children’s Literature, and studies on Fascism, are integrated, translations and rewritings of books for children are employed as hermeneutic tools to explore the multifaceted nature of the regime’s ideology and cultural production, beyond the official façade of unity and consistency. Central questions concerning the construction and defense of Fascist identity are addressed through a selection of case studies, showing different strategies and functions of translating and rewriting for children. The Fascist rewritings of Collodi’s Pinocchio are analysed in relation to Fascism’s relationship with tradition, focusing on the ways in which the past was ‘rewritten’ at different phases of the dictatorship. The challenges of translating a book that had been openly condemned by Fascist institutions are examined by looking at the two translations of Alice in Wonderland which appeared during the 1930s. The complex reception and the controversial success of American comics is investigated, where the different strategies of translation and re-creation reveal complex dynamics of interactions between imported and native products. Finally, the process of rewriting an apparently timeless and universal tradition is observed in the book series ‘La Scala d’Oro’, which was highly regarded by official culture, despite publishing mostly foreign titles.

This thesis examines the relationship of Irish and Scottish literature and film comparatively. The field of adaptation has traditionally centred around classical literary adaptations and the heritage film. Considering the increasing frequency with which contemporary novelists are adapted to film, it comes as a surprise that very little analysis has extended beyond the pages of the general media. Recent Irish and Scottish films in particular have relied upon the popularity of their literary exports in order to boost their indigenous filmmaking ventures. While generally considering the dialogic relationship between the publishing, film and television industries, this thesis specifically focuses on the adaptations of novels and short stories by Irish and Scottish writers from the 1980s to the present day. Part one, focusing on the work of Irish authors, looks at Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984) and Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985); Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997); Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy, comprising The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), The Snapper (Stephen Frears, 1993) and The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996); and Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). Part two examines the adaptations of Scottish writers, including Christopher Rush’s Venus Peter (Ian Seller, 1990); William McIlvanney’s The Big Man (David Leland, 1990) and Dreaming (Mike Alexander, 1990); Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996); and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002). Rather than carefully consider the fidelity of the translation from page to screen, this study examines the cultural circulation of the texts in alternative media in relation to their adaptive strategies. The novel’s role in representing ‘Irishness’ and ‘Scottishness’ versus and adapted film’s mode of representation is also considered alongside the influence of the director in contrast to the author, in order to reveal all of the contributing components to the development of a national cinema out of a national literature, both key components of a national culture.

The novel presents itself as a creative critical artefact, simultaneously fictitious and autoethnographic, borrowing from the disciplines of Fine Art and Film Studies to convey its troubling narrative. England has been torn apart in a civil war over immigration and ethnic minorities, the fighting long over but terrorists persisting in the knowledge that they are right. The Dogs, led by a disillusioned soldier from the traumatising conflict, recruit aimless adolescent boys wanting to be “men”, desensitising them to violence through film and ritualistic savagery. Lee struggles with the ease with which he excels in this world, far removed from his mother and young sister, Cissy, and it is only when he discovers that Muma is regularly prostituting the nine-year-old that his new aptitudes spill into his home. Lee and Cissy escape to the Dog’s base - a House that writes on its own walls, sitting close to the Wall bisecting the country, and it is here that Lee discovers the immolating roots of the faction, and the destructive impetus behind their acts. The artefact is sentient. It obfuscates its own text to protect Cissy, steals the words of other texts amidst scenes of torture to explain itself as it squirms and morphs within the reader’s hands, wrestles with its own abject content and sends endless warnings for the reader to stop and look away. This continues a theme of magical realism that sees animal totems as guardians and a landscape as emotionally scarred as any person by conflict and suffering. Reality is unstable, as are facile presumptions about justice and truth. Closer to Home is an example of practice-led research, wherein the text illuminates and examines the creative process behind writing physical violence, child sexual violence and simulacra violence, finding the domestic and familial roots of abject fiction writing.

The thesis examines British fiction of the 1990s, focusing on the `novel of history'. It contributes to the analysis of recent and contemporary British fiction, joining work by John Brannigan, Steven Connor, Peter Childs, Dominic Head, Rod Mengham, Nick Rennison and Alan Sinfield. Whilst these critics have written about the centrality of the historical novel, the significance of the Holocaust and its use in fictional narrative remains relatively under-theorised. Issues surrounding memory and representation and their relation to history are central to an understanding of how British 1990s Holocaust novels dramatise the events of the `real'. In this regard, the thesis contributes to the theory that the 1990s British novel often `looked backwards' over the waning century. Fiction attempting to represent the Holocaust has made a significant contribution to this `taking stock'. A number of issues arise surrounding the complex relationship between historical `event' and `imaginary' text. Given the extremity of the Holocaust and the persistence of it as a 'secular-sacred' discourse, such issues are further problematised. The central theme is how British writers in the 1990s, given their temporal, spatial and familial distance from the event, have negotiated the `limits of representation' inherent in the aesthetic apprehension of the Holocaust. The fiction under discussion is by Martin Amis, Justin Cartwright, Robert Harris, John King, Caryl Phillips, Michele Roberts, W. G. Sebald, Rachel Seiffert, Zadie Smith and D. M. Thomas. The `apocalyptic turn' that many have characterised as emblematic of the 1990s is interpreted as a turning back to an `apocalypse' that has already taken place. Tropes of fragmented temporality, absence and presence, the sublime, articulation and silence, trauma, atrocity and the inherent problems of retelling the past are interpreted in relation to each individual text. Recent writing on the representation of the Holocaust also informs the central arguments of the thesis. Work by Saul Friedlander, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Berel Lang, Dominick LeCapra, Daniel R. Schwarz and Sue Vice discuss both the enduring legacy of the Holocaust and the areas of contention surrounding the `speaking' of the event. Holocaust representation will thus provide a `bridge' between analysis of the historical novel since 1989 and theoretical work on imagining the `Final Solution'. The thesis title is taken from Sebald's Austerlitz and alludes to the theme of contemporary writers making imaginary and ethical `journeys' back to the `dark heart' of the century. It also suggests something of the impulse to remember and `serve witness' to a generation of survivors. In conclusion, the thesis argues that despite the hegemony of postmodern concepts of the `textuality' of history and the instability of narrative, the Holocaust embodies a fundamental challenge to cultural and political relativism. The novels embrace and argue back against postmodern literary strategies, and in doing so reveal how ethical and aesthetic issues of representation are profoundly `tested' in context of the Holocaust.

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 analyses representations of autism in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglo-American literature and film. It posits that, while many cultural portrayals of autism are more concerned with perpetuating the stereotypes surrounding the condition than with representing autistic experiences, there is evidence of a small but significant counter-current that is responding to and challenging more reductive representational modes. Each of my chapters examines prevailing narrative tropes that reinforce existing stereotypes of disability (narratives of overcoming, victimhood, dependency), which can be clearly evidenced in contemporary depictions of autism, from Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988) to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In each case, a significant proportion of texts use the generic markers of autistic representation to question and subvert these more established literary and cinematic approaches. The twenty-first century authors discussed in this thesis repurpose and interrogate the prevailing stereotypes of autistic representations, and provide provocative considerations for the study of postmodernism, crime fiction, melodrama and autobiography. This critical crossover and the employment of genre tropes cross-examines the subversive potential of genre fiction and the significance of postmodernism as frameworks for examining depictions of autism. This thesis proposes that this crucial minority of texts embodies a writing forwards out of stereotypes of autistic representations, by both autistic and neurotypical authors, into new, twenty-first century representational patterns.

The Collection tells the story of Barbara, a fifty-something, Christian, teacher, wife, and mother, as she is forced to return home after her estranged father's death. Named executrix of his estate, Barbara navigates family secrets, repressed childhood trauma, and her mentally ill father's legacy. Using Attachment Theory and Intergenerational Theories of Personal Development, this research discusses the development and relationships of the characters in The Collection to demonstrate the connections between their child and adult selves—specifically, the role of Barbara's parents and childhood in her suppressed anger. Framed within the context of Carolyn G. Heilbrun's feminist critique of women writers and women characters, this paper connects socio-psychological theories to investigate how the patriarchal gender norms Barbara's mother instilled in her daughter result in Barbara's suppressed anger, strained interpersonal relationships and adult religiosity. The relationship between adult Barbara and her aging mother is discussed in context of these theories and compared against women characters in Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. Finally, the paper calls for further research into and understanding of the causes and effects of women's anger, as well as an essential shift in how both men and women are permitted to express emotions.

In recent years, feminist critics have moved from focusing on the misogynistic aspects of late-Victorian evolutionary science to recognising that many women found liberating possibilities within this science. However, most studies of evolution and gender in New Woman writing have concentrated on serious novels. This thesis is the first full-length study of representations of evolution in women’s poetry. Focusing predominantly on the work of Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall, I examine how the depiction of evolution in women’s poetry of the 1880s and 1890s, particularly comic poetry, responds to the conclusions of professional scientists about the application of evolutionary theory to human society. By reading the poetry in the context of contemporary scientific works, in books and periodicals, I demonstrate that, unlike many social Darwinists, who used evolutionary theory to reinforce the status quo, these poets found aspects within Darwin’s work that could be used to disrupt assumptions about natural femininity and to argue for the necessity of social change. The themes examined in this thesis include change, the blurring of boundaries and undermining of hierarchies, the association of white women with people of other races in scientific discourse, and Darwin’s representation of women’s sexual and reproductive role.