A study of Henry Vaughan’s early life and friends; his attitude to and part in contemporary affairs; poems (1646); Olor Iscanus: translations; Silex Scintillans; the prose works 1651-1655; Thalia Rediviva; his attitude to nature; his views on pre-existence; childhood; the past; style; reading and teachers; and his influence.

'The Saturday Night Ghost Club', a work involving selective memory loss resulting from a traumatic event, depicts the mechanics of this loss, conveying the manner in which a primary character’s condition — one distinguished by his inability to remember a key trauma — combines with active strategies to avoid recall of said trauma. In preparing to write this thesis, and in toggling between the critical and creative elements, I found myself drawn back to a theme of long obsession: the idea of memory loss and memory retrieval, and the bedrock scientific and psychological principles that inform the subject. I was interested in the plausibility of the condition affecting Calvin Sharpe, and curious about the science and psychology of memory repression following trauma; this led to an interest in the manner in which it has been represented in fiction — specifically, the fiction of my home country. As the creative thesis took shape, I began to (a) re-read works in which memory plays a role, paying attention to books featuring depictions of medical conditions which effect memory — for example, “buried” or “repressed” memories — play a role, and (b) investigate scientific sources and general readership books focused on behavioural sciences, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

This work discusses the theory of the Tragic and the Comic as revealed in the French approach to Shakespeare's tragedy and comedy, with particular reference to certain examples of each genre. In part I, chapters 1-4 inclusive examine questions which are basic to the understanding of Shakespeare in France. In part II, chapters 5-9 inclusive deal with the French approach to Shakespeare's tragedy, the first two of them being based on "Shakespeare and Corneille" and "Shakespeare and Racine" respectively. In part III, chapters 10-16 inclusive turn to the question of the French approach to Shakespeare's comedy, the first of them trying to throw some light on the complex differences and similarities between French and English comedy.

My thesis is an exploration of the collaborations between British and Irish dramatists and Shakespeare over the past forty years. Within its bounds, there exists an extensive collection of innovative works produced in spaces from the community halls of the fringe to the main stages of the national theatres. The dramatists in question write from diverse perspectives. They may inflect elements in the work to counter stereotypes, employ intertextual images to subvert naturalistic scenes, or, alternatively, deploy the dark images inherent in the language in modern tragedies. It is helpful to think about this relationship in terms of a series of exchanges: contemporary dramatists influence Shakespearean production, offering fresh readings of the plays; and they value Shakespeare’s poetry and ability to address history in an enduring form. Although there are parallels with the present, denying Shakespearean resolutions can reflect present-day complexities. New plays are viewed as ‘collaborations’ rather than ‘appropriations’ or ‘adaptations’, so as to place the focus on the coming together of ideas from more than one source. It is not so much about what contemporary dramatists have done to Shakespeare, but how and why they have chosen to combine their ideas with those inherent in his works.

The Second Space is a novel that presents the place of women in a patriarchal society, exploring themes such as sexuality, reclamation of space, and the power of physical objects. It follows the story of a woman who escapes from the prospect of marriage and works to discover her self-identity, forging meaningful relationships with other women. The accompanying critical study contributes to the knowledge of women’s writing and the creative process by acknowledging the existence of a distinct space for women in a patriarchal society. This concept is called ‘The Second Space’. This study refutes the assumption that women’s fiction is autobiographical due to the use of themes such as domesticity and motherhood, demonstrating the value of building a narrative for women. The sources that support this research include creative, critical and feminist texts, as follows: Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, and Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, Carla Kaplan’s The Erotic’s of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms, Sean Burke’s Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, Micaela Maftei’s The Fiction of Autobiography, Margaret Atwood’s On Writers and Writing, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Communication between politicians and the public is rarely direct and first-hand, but almost always mediated by journalist opinions and values. Consequently, the way in which the media reports on State matters has a profound impact on people’s understanding of political processes and their attitudes towards the governing figures. The aim of this research project is to investigate the role that the Polish Press assumes in mediating women’s involvement in contemporary politics. Stemming from the perspective of feminist critical linguistics, the thesis empirically examines a wide array of media publications derived from leading Polish socio-political magazines (‘Polityka’, ‘Wprost’, ‘Newsweek Polska’) and electronic press. By engaging with the journalist discourse, it focuses on the importance of language in generating epistemological claims about women and femininity. It demonstrates not only how female subjectivities are produced in the Polish public domain, but also how history and culture impinge on these constructions in a dialectical-relational manner. The intention is to draw up an ‘inventory’ of signifying practices through which female MPs emerge as gendered subjects in the hope that this will inspire closer scrutiny of media content, leading to its informed critique and transformation.

This thesis investigates male sexuality and neoliberalism in the work of David Foster Wallace. I argue that his texts conceive of male sexuality through neoliberal logics regarding responsibility, risk, contract, property, and austerity. Informing such conceptions are spermatic metaphors of investment, waste, blockage, and release. These dynamics allow Wallace’s texts to ground masculinity in an apparently incontestable sexual hideousness, characterised in particular by negativity and violence. By figuring male sexuality as a neutral economic issue, and one that lends itself to spermatic metaphors, his fiction and nonfiction present such hideousness as a fact to be accommodated for rather than changed. My analysis is broadly revisionist. I depart from readings that stress his texts’ opposition to neoliberalism by showing how they are embedded in, and complicit in reproducing, its key logics. I also nuance considerations of Wallace’s gender politics by arguing that their sexual traditionalism is indicative of an attachment to male hideousness, not their author’s intentions or failings. In these ways my thesis evaluates the complex pessimism animating Wallace’s treatment of male sexuality. I trace the interaction between neoliberal logics and spermatic metaphors throughout his oeuvre to consider how and why Wallace presents male sexuality as being so immutably rotten.

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.

This thesis examines the subtitling of films depicting the French banlieue into English. The banlieues are housing estates situated on the outskirts of large towns and cities, and are primarily home to the underprivileged, and immigrants to France or their descendants. The sociolect spoken in the banlieue differs from standard French in terms of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation. Three films released between 2000 and the present day are studied; La squale (Genestal, 2000), L'esquive (Kechiche, 2003) and Divines (Benyamina, 2016). A new integrated methodology is developed, which examines the films within their broader contexts of release, and in light of paratextual material contributing to the context of reception, and to the viewer's understanding of the topic at hand. Directors representing the banlieue on screen generally do so with a view to provoking thought or public discussion in relation to the banlieues. In addition to macro- and micro-contextual analysis of the films and subtitles, the work is underpinned by an examination of the subtitling situation, encompassing the views and experiences of subtitlers working on banlieue film, and technical analysis of the subtitles in terms of readability. Through interviews of professional subtitlers, and close technical analysis of the subtitles, this research is contextualised within the industry, and within current conventions and guidelines. Close analysis of subtitles and the translation solutions they present reveals that some of the socio-political messages presented in the films may not be evident to a non-French speaking viewer of the English-subtitled versions. Although the informal nature of many conversations featuring the langage de banlieue is sometimes clear in the subtitled version, the unique sociolect of the characters is not. In two of the case study films, a dialect-for-dialect approach was adopted, where African American vernacular English was used in the subtitles to demonstrate the use of non-standard language. However, it is argued that ultimately, this dialect-for-dialect approach, combined with cultural similarities between the French banlieue and American street culture, could lead the British Anglophone viewer to negotiate the banlieues and those who live there via their knowledge of American street culture. This could contribute to American cultural hegemony, and does not convey the specificity of France's banlieues as cultural melting pots.

No description available.