Dreaming In Whispering Groves is an investigation into the production, transmission and reception of the book-as-object with specific reference to nine eighteenth century novels over four centuries: Robinson Crusoe; The Adventures Of The Count de Vinevil; Pamela; David Simple; Amelia; Betsy Thoughtless; Evelina; The Monk and The Italian. I examine the relationship between the reader, the book-as-text and the book-as-object, approaching my topic from the standpoint of a Reader Response and Rezeption-aesthetic critic. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, I draw upon Art, History, Literature, Philosophy, Social Science, Technology and Textual Scholarship, in order to create a context for, and trace the development of the social and physical derivation, distribution, adoption and cultivation of the physical object book. My centra-stance to reader-orientated theories is provided by Memetics. A relative newcomer to the critical scene which has evolved as a result of, and parallel to, the study of genetics. The purpose of this juxtaposition is that both Reader-orientated theories and Memetics are dependent upon the reading or interpretation of data - the words on the page or the material to be replicated (in the case of the meme). However, my perception is that both offer an explanation of the way in which 'culture' has evolved and will continue to evolve but perhaps most importantly for the purpose of this thesis they provide answers to questions with regard to the book-as-object. Original empirical research in the form of a web-based questionnaire and a traditional paper-based one, and class-based role-play forms the foundation of an investigation into readers' responses to the book as a physical object. The responses have provided substantial evidence to corroborate my original hypothesis (now thesis). The mode of presentation for this thesis (including the use of fonts based on samples of 18th and early 19th century type and printers ornaments that suggest the quirks of wood-cut and early metal type) is intended as an integral part of the way in which the argument is developed. The readers/examiner's response to this 'book/thesis-as-object' is being sought, and the reader is therefore asked to engage with the contents bearing this in mind.

The private and public domains are usually regarded as a dichotomy: what is in one is not in the other. There can be many reasons for intrusions by the news media into the private lives of people. This thesis assesses the extent to which celebrity is a useful conduit for understanding why the media intrudes into people’s private lives and the extent to which celebrity affects any public interest justification for doing so. In essence: does celebrity make a difference in press intrusions into the private lives of others, or is it just one of many factors. The private lives of celebrities have been subject to invasion by the press for many years, while the conceptual definition of privacy has been fiercely debated by academics and lawyers. In 2011, as a direct consequence of the revelation that the News of the World had illegally accessed murder victim Milly Dowler’s voicemail during an active police investigation into her disappearance, the first part of the Leveson Inquiry was launched in order to examine the relationship between the British press and the public, the police and politicians. The significance of the Leveson Inquiry on public life and the media and political spheres means that an analysis of press intrusions into the private lives of both celebrities and those, like the Dowler family, who were unlucky enough to fall under scrutiny due to tragic events, is essential in understanding the relationship between celebrity, privacy and the press in twenty-first century England. This thesis utilises an observation study of the Leveson Inquiry public hearings from the Royal Courts of Justice, and the resulting evidence, to investigate the impact of celebrity on the nature and extent of press intrusion into the privacy of celebrities, and how it differs in the cases of noncelebrities who become of interest to the media. The thesis concludes that the element of celebrity has a major impact on press intrusion into the private lives of individuals regardless of their personal status, as ordinary individuals are targeted due to their proximity to a celebrity, or as a result of being caught up in extraordinary circumstances. However, social media platforms are threatening the role of the press in revealing private information about individuals to the general public, as both traditional celebrities and ‘internet micro-celebrities’ communicate directly with global audiences.

This thesis examines the representations of housing in the fiction and non-fiction texts of Gordon Burn, Andrew O’Hagan and David Peace. This thesis will explore the relationship between housing and class in all three writers’ work and consider the ways in which housing displays and conceals class. These three writers have never been critically examined together, and their similar subject matter provides interesting points of contrast and comparison. ‘Housing. The Greatest Issue of Our Poor Century’ writes Andrew O’Hagan in his novel Our Fathers (1999) and this is a sentiment shared by Burn and Peace throughout their texts. All three writers depict the ways in which housing has changed over the course of the twentieth century, as against the slum clearances of post-World War II Britain, Modernist tower blocks were erected. Against these visual changes there was a sustained campaign, by all major political parties, to increase home ownership. A succession of Acts throughout the latter half of the twentieth century saw council houses being sold to tenants and a subsequent decrease in the construction of council houses. These Acts promoted, and made easily achievable, home ownership and ingrained within society the idea that owning property was a symbol of success and security. By examining changes in housing Burn, Peace and O'Hagan consider the fate of the working-class in the latter half of the twentieth century, and this thesis will explore to what extent, and in what ways, housing displays and conceals class. Chapter One will consider the changes in housing policy over the latter half of the twentieth century and the ways in which government policy affected issues of class. This chapter will look at the ways in which Burn, Peace and O’Hagan consider issues of class and will argue that by examining issues of housing all three are examining the fate of the working-class. Issues of housing are inexorably linked with issues of class and this chapter will form the basis on which the remaining chapters’ arguments are based. Chapter Two will explore issues of housing in the cases of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West, specifically the ways in which housing both concealed and motivated their crimes and how in turn assumptions about class hide their murders within plain sight. Chapter Three will examine the construction of high-rise tower blocks and the ways in which the creation of housing allowed for social crimes to be committed for both political and economic gain by various individuals. Chapter Four will look at the underground spaces of the houses featured in the previous chapters and will consider to what extent the underground reflects the issues of the over-ground and the significance of the underground in debates about class. The final Chapter, Chapter Five, will look at depictions of the celebrity house and will consider how the house of the celebrity fits into narratives of twentieth century housing and how the inhabitants are as hidden and revealed as their working-class counter parts.

This thesis examines Gaelic poetry and the military between 1756 and 1856. While previous studies have collated and analysed the poetry of two of the other major impacts on Gaelic society at this time, clearance and emigration, there has so far been no concerted attempt to examine and place in context the corpus of Gaelic military material of the period – despite this verse being widespread in the poetic record. This poetry has been largely neglected by scholars of Scottish history, and, though selected pieces have been examined by scholars of Celtic Studies, it has not received the fullness of attention that such a major concern in the poetic record deserves. This thesis therefore directly addresses this gap in previous scholarship. The study first considers the historical and literary context for this corpus of poetry, in order to establish the background to Gaelic military verse in the post-Culloden period. A chronological approach is taken to consider this poetry over the course of five chapters. The first period explored is that between the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolutionary War (1756-93). Two chapters cover the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), focussing respectively on verse by soldiers and non-combatants. The next chapter has as its focus the period between the British Victory at Waterloo and the end of the Crimean War (1815-56). The last chapter takes a different chronological approach to those which preceded it, examining women’s poetry and the military across the one-hundred year time period. Each of these chapters explore the background to, contemporary context for, and content of this corpus of Gaelic military verse from 1756 to 1856. A full database of the corpus of 178 poems is also included. There is a focus throughout the thesis on the manner in which poets drew from and utilised their poetic tradition to contextualise the British military and its influence. Another major strand of the research is its examination of loyalty as expressed or revealed in the poetic record. The thesis contends that this corpus of poetry deserves a central place in the military historiography of the Highlands and Gaelic literary criticism.

Diagrams and schemas included in medieval medical manuscripts are understudied within art historical scholarship. This thesis discusses the multivalence of meanings — medical, social and theological — generated within schemas included in sixteen different medical codices, produced in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Through text-image analysis, by considering the diagrams in relationship to the texts that immediately surround them and the other texts included within the same codex, the following chapters show that diagrams, through different means, emphasised or legitimized the surrounding texts and medical practices. Additional analysis is interpictorial: the visual motifs are considered in relationship to similar and related pictorial subjects, familiar from other manuscripts and artistic contexts. Through consideration of the intervisual references to devotional art and other scientific schemas, the multiple meanings of the medical diagrams are further elucidated. Another feature of the codices that is studied is their status as physical objects, how they were held, used, leafed through and transported. Lastly, by situating the codices and their diagrams within a late medieval English social, ideological and religious milieu, a deeper understanding of their function is achieved. This thesis shows that rather than being simple tools used in medical practice or representations of medical theories, diagrams included in medical manuscripts functioned in multiple, prescriptive and descriptive, ways to define theological, civic and gendered ideas around social order.

My research answers the need for a comparative approach in the research of the history of Eastern Europe. In this respect I will compare the relationship between the writers and the power wielders in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia during the first twenty years of communist power in the two countries (1948-1968). My main idea is firstly to trace the influence of the international context on the domestic scene in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, and then to show how writers in the two countries answered the challenges posed by their political context. In terms of the international context, I will outline the role of the Soviet Union in the political development of the two countries. In connection with the domestic context, I will illustrate the two models of relations between the power wielders and the writers, exemplified by the Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov and the First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Antonín Novotný. The second trajectory of the research focuses on the conflicts conducted in the highest organ of control in the writers’ sphere - the Praesidium of the Writers’ Union. On the basis of primary sources, I will demonstrate the different approach exhibited by the writers in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia in a period of political unification. As a result of this comparison the thesis will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between the politics and the arts in Eastern Europe during the Communist period.

This case study investigates how readers read comics. The work, based upon Roland Barthes' concept of relay discussed in Image, Music, Text (1977), considers that a reader tmderstands the comic at the higher level of the diegesis by switching between signifying systems. The research fmdings suggest that the reading of comics requires visual and verbal intermediate literacy skills and that textual coherence occurs for readers when they reach the critical point in their own reading. The coherence of the text and critical point for the reader are achieved as a result of the cOlmections between the signifying systems of description and depiction, at the level of the individual sign and the textual structure. The analysis of such data as the features of the comic and readers' responses to texts, proposes a model based upon the concept of a core and periphery spiral. It suggests that knowledge frameworks, visual and verbal literacy and the metalinguistic skill of 'relay' are required to read the comic text; but in order to reach a critical point for understanding these need to be synthesised with affective responses. The comic form is also placed into a cultural and literacy context and implications of the fmdings for using this form in education are discussed.

Finn mac Cumaill (Fionn Mac Cumhaill) has always been a popular figure in Gaelic tradition, coming to full prominence during the Early Modern period, as Fenian stories (tales of Finn and his fían, or fianna, known as fianaigecht in Old Irish and fiannaíocht in Modern Irish) become ever more popular in manuscript form. Despite the popularity that both Finn and the Finn Cycle have enjoyed in Gaelic literature, mentions of Finn's death are scant and tales recounting the event are even rarer. In the extant medieval Irish literature, the pinnacle of the corpus, Acallam na Senórach, not only holds the events in relative obscurity but its presentation of the circumstances of Finn's death may even be said to be conflicting. In looking at other tales in the fíanaigecht corpus, while we find a number of references to the fact than Finn dies, only a few depict his demise, namely Aided Finn and Tesmolta Cormaic ocus Aided Finn. To this short list of narratives detailing Finn's death and the events preceding it, we can add the tale designated 'The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn and the Death of Finn' (henceforth 'The Chase') preserved in a single manuscript, London, British Library, MS Egerton 1782. Although the tale breaks off with Finn still alive, albeit weary and bloodied and standing alone encircled by his adversaries, his death is a logical next element in the narrative, not least because there is repeated mention of a prophecy of his demise throughout the tale. This tale, which spans eight manuscript pages, seems to be the longest engagement with the idea of Finn's death in the medieval and Early Modern Irish corpora, yet has been the subject of very little scholarly investigation to date. This regrettable lacuna in scholarship on Fenian literature is the starting point for this thesis, which presents a three-pronged investigation of 'The Chase'. Following a fuller introduction to the topic in Chapter 1, the history of the manuscript is examined afresh in Chapter 2 as new evidence, particularly from the works of the scribe Muiris Ó Gormáin, has shed new light on the manuscript's history and on the tale of 'The Chase'. This is then employed to examine the section of the manuscript in which 'The Chase' is to be found, a section consisting of four tales thought to be from the now lost manuscript, Cín Dromma Snechtai, and four fíanaigecht tales. It is investigated if the unit may be considered a deliberate anthology and whether thematic and/or other concerns motivated the unit's compilation. Next, the study turns to the tale of 'The Chase' itself, examining its place within a continuum of traditions found in Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish treatments of Finn's death. Based on my own linguistic work on 'The Chase', a semi-diplomatic edition of which is included as an appendix to this thesis, it is demonstrated in Chapter 3 that the author of 'The Chase' seems to have been aware of several accounts of Finn's death, either those which are now extant or sources akin to them, and sought to bring together many of the elements present in other accounts of Finn's death in a single tale, perhaps in what was intended to be a comprehensive death tale for Finn. The various elements of the tale which resonate with the event of or events leading up to Finn's death, however, have not merely been cobbled together. Rather it is illustrated that the composition skilfully treats of the themes of death, prophecy and youth versus age, making regular allusion to the audience's presumed knowledge of other tales of the Fenian corpus, while adhering to the norms of earlier written fíanaigecht literature, a trait not always found in Early Modern tales of the Finn Cycle. The last study which forms part of this thesis, Chapter 4, arose from the recognition that although 'The Chase' appears to be the longest extant engagement with Finn's death, there exists no study that details what material on Finn's death has circulated in the modern period. This section provides a comprehensive overview of modern engagements with Finn's death in post-1650 manuscripts and folklore collections. All the modern accounts that I have found to date in which Finn's death is recounted or in which it is presumed that Finn is dead, which are usually mentions of Finn's grave, are therefore identified, presented, and where applicable, translated. While it becomes clear that no other engagement with Finn's demise across the eleven centuries during which his death excited the Gaelic imagination is as long or as complex as 'The Chase', common or notable motifs in the modern accounts are identified, and similarities between the different treatments of Finn's death in the modern narratives are discussed. It is shown that a small number of the motifs and events treated in the medieval accounts of Finn’s death and in 'The Chase' are also treated in the modern tales of his demise, thus indicating some thematic continuity between medieval and modern approaches to relating how Finn died. With this in mind, some further relationships between the modern accounts of Finn's death and other medieval and modern Fenian literature are explored.

Lewis Carroll’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published as an illustrated book in 1865 and has been represented in film since 1903. Existing literary studies regard the Alice story as a work of children’s literature and ignore the materiality of its form. My thesis addresses the question of how the Alice story has been mediated as different images in various forms such as book illustrations, magic lantern presentations, films and stop-motion animations. I argue that these mediations were influenced by contemporaneous material practices and media technologies, and that these mediations, in their various forms, reflected and influenced the public’s imagination regarding the Alice story. My research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the Alice story, regarding the Alice book as one of many forms through which the story has been presented, and associating literature with other media forms. Chapter One focuses on the illustrations and their relationship to both the literary text and their historical context. Chapter Two brings some magic lantern presentations of the Alice story into discussion with new archival materials, and considers the relationship between the lantern slides, illustration, and cinema. Chapters Three, Four and Five address the images of Alice and Wonderland in cinema, covering photographic images, animation and stop-motion animation. I argue that films provide various images of Alice and Wonderland, and construct new representational relationships between the Alice story, the imagined and reality. By investigating the material history of the Alice story through the case studies covered in my thesis, I conclude that the transformation of the Alice story, from the 1860s to the present day, is closely related to the development of material practices and media technologies, and is a reflection of common themes in modernity.

The creation of a highly detailed on-line catalogue of Walter Scott’s Library at Abbotsford has made it possible for the first time, not only to see exactly what items Scott collected, but also in many cases to determine when and how he acquired them. If, as Alberto Manguel has claimed, all libraries are autobiographical, what does this enhanced information about Abbotsford Library tells us about Scott? Five distinct topics have been selected for examination: Americana, Ireland, Science, Politics and Bibliography. They have been chosen because, although they are for the most part not subjects frequently connected with Scott, they are nonetheless areas on which he collected a substantial amount of books or manuscripts, and for which substantive information about his involvement or interest can be deduced from external sources such as his Journal or correspondence. In addition to the investigation of these specific subject areas, the collection as a whole is explored for evidence for Scott’s personal relationships, both with other writers and with members of his family, focussing especially on his collections of Burns and Byron, the commonplace book he kept as a young man, and his own marginalia. Evidence concerning Scott’s final book purchases is surveyed against the conflicting accounts of his mental and physical health in 1831/2 as given by J. G. Lockhart, William Gell, and other contemporary observers, and an account of the afterlife of the Library traces its history from Scott’s death to the present day to examine how closely the present arrangement of the books resembles that intended by Scott, and whether changes which took place after his death could mislead us into drawing incorrect conclusions. Finally a description of the twenty-first century cataloguing process with some statistical analysis of the contents of the Library examines the importance of the holdings to ask if this is a significant collection, even without the provenance of one of the most popular and prolific writers of the Romantic Era, and whether Scott’s influence on nineteenth-century book culture is one of his most important contributions to modern scholarship.