This thesis examines the process of mass communication from media strategies to audience belief in relation to the conflict in Ireland. It documents the media strategies used by the various actors and participants in the conflict, from the Northern Ireland Office, Royal Ulster Constabulary, Foreign Office and Army to Sinn Fén and the Irish Republican Army, via the Ulster Defence Association, other political parties, Civil liberties and human rights organisations and many others. It reveals the continuing disinformation efforts of the British government, examines how source organisations interact with journalistsw, how journalists and their editors operate and looks at the outcome of their endeavours by analysing international coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict. Finally, the research examines the reception of media information amongst people living in Northern Ireland and Britain. Key questions here included the extent to which `violence' acted as a key organising category in British perceptions of the conflict and the effectiveness of propaganda in structuring public (mis)understandings.

This thesis focuses on the ways in which identity and ritual converge within the emancipatory performances of the Trinidad Carnival and the Caribbean inspired Carnivals of Notting Hill and Cardiff. The work looks as the ways in which Carnival performances can be interpreted in order to investigate how these interpretations can be practically utilised within art-making or art presentation. The thesis develops an innovative reading of the word mas' (masquerade/mask) offering new perspectives that can serve as a nucleus for ways of engaging with and analysing Carnival. The consideration of mas' as a performance activity with traits that can be manifested within and outside of the Carnival environment is highly relevant and has been applied in my practical art experiment called 'Mama dat is Mas'. The project also aims to analyse the ways in which re-interpretations of mas' can engage with issues of social anxiety and feelings of displacement.

This thesis considers the works of six major literary figures in the context of their engagement with the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. These writers are, in order of analysis, Edwin Morgan, J.K. Rowling, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, Kathleen Jamie, and John Burnside. Each has produced a significant literary oeuvre which is examined here in relation to each other's work and to the Referendum debate. The multifaceted relationship between literature and politics is investigated through the lens of the Referendum, utilising these six figures as interrelated case studies. Chapter One explores Edwin Morgan and J.K. Rowling in relation to each other and the concept of nationalism as manifested in the Referendum period. Chapter Two focuses on postcolonialism and the work of Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead in that same context. The third and final chapter is concerned with Kathleen Jamie's and John Burnside's preoccupation with ecopoetics, and how that concern overlapped with Referendum discourse. This thesis provides new readings of these six writers in the context of the Referendum. It sets out to establish that, while their published literary works are often connected to the spectrum of stances these writers took regarding the Referendum, these works need to be considered with respect to the nuanced attention all six had previously given to key themes of the Referendum debate in the decades leading up to that political moment.

This thesis explores a number of interdisciplinary writings on the Italian past by later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistically minded critics and cultural commentators, with a view to recovering their historiographical importance. Beginning with an exploration of the parameters and scope of a genre defined as 'aesthetic history', along with some theoretical work grounded in current debates about the nature of historical representation, this thesis goes on to offer in-depth discussion of texts on the Italian past by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence and Adrian Stokes. By offering a critical reconstruction of each author's thinking about the past, along with the cogent and ill-explored engagements they make with historiographical study, this thesis affords the reader a better understanding of some of the tensions present in historical writing - tensions surrounding issues of epistemology, visuality, psychology and materiality - during what were decades of great change in historical thinking. Moreover, this thesis offers a detailed investigation into the important role played by the Italian past in the aesthetic-historical canon, which in turn produces a more complicated picture of the connections between literature, aesthetics and historiography during this period.

It has often been stated that sea poetry, that is to say literature in which the sea and sea faring find poetic expression, first makes its entry into German literature in the year 1826. The prominent position of the sea and of ships in nineteenth century poetry requires no proof. There is not yet in existence, however, a comprehensive study of the part played by the sea in the corpus of German literature as a whole. The present dissertation represents an attempt to marshal and characterise the materials for such a work.

An analysis of Webster’s dramatic method in the two plays The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. Aspects discussed include his dramatic method, verbal patterns, style and vocabulary, and his wit and satire.

The thesis has been prepared on the assumption that Hogarth's picture series are essentially narrative works. They are considered in the Introduction in the light of recent definitions of the narrative strip, a medium in which Hogarth was a considerable innovator. The first six chapters consist of an analysis of each of the pictures in Marriage à la Mode. The analysis was undertaken as a means of exploring the nature of Hogarth's imagination and to discover how coherent a work the series is. There is an emphasis on characterization and setting because Hogarth himself chose to isolate character as a feature in the subscription ticket to Marriage á la Mode. The figures acquire their depth through their interaction with the setting. The interaction compensates for the lack of physical movement in Hogarth's picture narratives and is a source of much of his humour. A number of sections are concerned with relevant background information, such as the traditional rivalry between the cities of London and Westminster, and the medical details of the quack doctor's laboratory. The seventh chapter is concerned with the literary allusion in Marriage à la Mode, particularly to the popular drama of the time. The eighth is concerned with the extensive and ironic use of analogies. The ninth chapter is concerned with the subject of structure, including the delineation of the rôle of the projected spectator as defined by the work which contains him. The tenth is about theme and includes the use made of the traditional elements and 'humours'. It is concluded that Marriage à la Mode is a tragi-comic and melodramatic work, and that Hogarth in what are here termed periphrastic sequences came close to making images behave like words without their becoming dependent on any verbal form. His achievement lay in the ability intelligently to organize diversity into a unified structure, similar to that of situation comedy.

The purpose of this thesis is to establish the contribution of the Soviet weekly, Literaturnaya gazeta, to the debunking of official dogmas during the Brezhnev years. Launched in 1967, the second section of Literaturnaya gazeta has frequently been dismissed as a mere safety valve, highly controlled by the authorities, to placate the educated middle classes demoralized by the conservative backlash. It is argued in this study that, although the paper accepted the political parameters of the post-Thaw conservative leadership, as evinced, in particular, by the extreme limitations of the economic debates and the absence of any material investigating the country’s Stalinist past, it nevertheless succeeded in promoting values which ran counter to the official ideology. The paper reflected the demoralization of Soviet society and its inability to change within the existing structures. Soviet society emerged as being morally corrupt, riddled with individualism, suspicion and petty authoritarianism. Individuals were shown at the mercy of faceless bureaucracies and overpowered by a judiciary system dominated by the state procuracy. The paper actively promoted a more individual-centred type of society by overtly challenging the collectivist ethos, campaigning for the recognition of consumer rights and arguing the case for a fairer judiciary system.

Most research into contemporary French West Indian literature focuses on writing that stresses the significance of the plantation and urban cultures of the islands in the early to mid-twentieth century or, more recently, on the desire of some writers to explore broader trans-national influences or environments. Despite the prominence of migration in post-war French West Indian history, however, less has been said about the engagement of French West Indian literature with migration to metropolitan France. Although commentators have recently begun to discuss the work of a handful of writers in connection with migration to the métropole, this thesis offers a full-length analysis of the issue, bringing writers, texts and literary and cultural theories together with the cultural and sociological context of migration to metropolitan France. I comment on a variety of well-known authors and texts, while also presenting writers and writing that have frequently been neglected in other studies. I also consider the reasons for what I believe to be both the slow development of a literature of migration, as well as the low profile of this issue within Francophone literary studies. Part One, ‘French and West Indian: Historical and Sociological Contexts’, considers the broad context of migration, reflecting on how that context impacts on the West Indians and their descendants in the métropole. Part Two, ‘Theory and the French West Indian Diaspora’, looks at colonisation, postcolonial criticism, and the current scholarship devoted to them, as these concern the issues of migration and identity in sociological and literary terms. Part Three, ‘Patterns of Discourse: Reflections of the Métropole’, takes recurrent themes that have appeared in the works of a variety of less well-known writers, including writers of West Indian origin born in the métropole. In Part Four, ‘Siting the Métropole’, I examine three successful yet very different writers and consider their contributions to the literature of migration, in the light of the reflections made and the patterns uncovered earlier in this thesis. My conclusion unites the themes of inclusion and exclusion that this subject brings to the fore, and suggests potential literary and scholarly developments for the future.

Using wide-ranging literature and theoretical concepts published digitally and in print, this thesis will build the emerging picture of African literature in English that is being published in the digital space. The study will analyse the technological production of classed and sexualised bodies in new African writing in cyberspace by some of the young writers from Nigeria and Kenya, as well as writing from a few of their contemporaries from other African countries. This thesis will also analyse the differences between the agenda of the previous generation – including representation and perspectives - and that of a new generation in cyberspace. In the process, I hope to show how literature in cyberspace is asking questions as much of psychic landscapes as of the material world. To my knowledge, there is no substantive literary study done so far that contextualizes this digital experience.