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This thesis investigates textual cultures of heroism in Scottish literature c. 1600-1660 as evidenced in a corpus of texts engaged with evolving concepts of martial virtue, honour and masculinity. It provides the first sustained analyses of four seventeenth-century romances – Penardo and Laissa (1615) and Prince Robert (1615), both by Patrick Gordon, Sheretine and Mariana (1622) by Patrick Hannay and Calanthrop and Lucilla (1626) by John Kennedy – and their trajectory within a Scottish tradition of writing that was engaged in a fundamental search for its ideal national hero. Over the course of this research, a series of intriguing connections and networks began to emerge which illuminated an active and diverse community of ‘martial writers’ from whom this corpus of texts were conceived. From these pockets of creativity, there emerged a small but significant body of writers who shared not just a military career but often patronage, experience of service in Europe and a literary interest in what I will define in this thesis as the search for post-Union (1603) Scottish male identity. What began as a study of romance texts was prompted to seek new lines of enquiry across a wide and varied body of texts as it sought to engage with a changeable but distinctive thematic discourse of martial heroism, conduct literature for young men disguised as romance. Its findings are by no means always finite; a partly speculative attempt is made to illuminate the path of one particularly pervasive thread of literary discourse – martial virtue – rather than to lay false claims to homogeneity. The nature of this enquiry means that the thesis examines a vast array of texts, including the fictional romances mentioned above and others such as Sir George Mackenzie’s Aretina; Or, the Serious Romance (1660) and John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), non-fictional texts such as Robert Munro’s The Expedition (1638), George Lauder’s The Scottish Soldier (1629) and James Hume’s Pantaleonis Vaticinia Satyra (1633), and their engagement with issues of martial service. It is, in essence, a study of the seventeenth-century Scottish literary hero, sought naturally at first among the epic and fantastical landscapes of fictional romance, but pursued further into the martial world inhabited by its authors, patrons, and, as will be argued, its readers. In mapping this hitherto neglected topic and its related corpus of texts, the thesis identifies a number of potentially characteristic emphases which evince the development of a specifically martial conversation in seventeenth-century Scotland. It foregrounds the re-emergence of feudal narratives of male identity in the wake of the 1603 Union of the Crowns and after the outbreak of Civil and European war, in which the martial warrior of Brucian romance emerges once again as an ideal model of heroism – the natural antithesis to the more (self-evidently) courtly romance narratives produced at the Stuart court in London. Coupled with the inheritance of a late-fifteenth and sixteenth-century poetics which foregrounds reading as an act of moral investment (from which later writers appear to select the specifically reader-focused aspects of Christian Humanism), the erudite soldier and his corresponding literary protagonist begin to emerge as the foremost Scottish hero in a selection of both fictive and non-fictive texts, from vernacular romance to memoirs and chronicles, and in prose fiction. Across this diverse corpus of texts, collective emphases upon the moral investment of reading, exemplar-based use of historical materials and Scotland’s martial past emerge as a shared advisory paradigm, a conduct book of behaviours for the young Scottish male.

MS Glasgow Hunter 252 is the sole surviving manuscript copy of the 'Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles'. The present PhD thesis, funded by a Glasgow University Scholarship and supervised by James Simpson and Peter Davies, explores the language of this collection of bawdy tales, attributed to the court of Philippe III de Bourgogne (1396-1467). Most existing studies on the language of the 'Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles' have offered a literary (e.g. stylistic, narratological) perspective, and very few have considered the document within the wider context of French historical linguistics. The present thesis aims to fill this gap by: •Presenting elements of linguistic interest within the document (dialectalisms, archaisms, rare features, cultural references, etc.), through a comprehensive survey of phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. •Expanding and reassessing existing theories on orthographic standardisation and dialectal input in written and, more speculatively, spoken Middle French. •Providing scriptological evidence towards the localisation of other textual resources within the online 'Dictionnaire du moyen français (1330-1500)'. •Investigating the authenticity of the mise-en-scène of the 'Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles'; reflecting on linguistic practices and note-taking at the Court of Burgundy. •Exploring spoken language as rendered by direct speech passages, with special consideration of linguistic variation and stereotyping. •Publishing textual databases for future analysis (tables of main spelling variants, alphabetical list of words, etc.).

The aim of this thesis is to examine what a study of the visual presentation of the fourteenth-century poet-composer Guilluame de Machaut's songs can tell us that studying them simply as pre-defined works cannot. This has involved two distinct, but related fields of enquiry. Firstly, I have developed of a way of considering the six manuscripts of Machaut containing what appear to be his complete works which focuses on the visual impact of each codex as a whole, from the materials used to the content it contains (text, images, music). This methodology, which draws on the works of such scholars as B. Cerquiglini (Eloge de la variante, 1989), S. Huot (From Song to Book, 1987), and D. Leech-Wilkinson (The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, 2002) and relies heavily on primary sources, is founded on the premise that each of the manuscripts is a complete and unique artefact, irrespective of who created it and for what purpose. Building on this, I argue that each manuscript can be considered a performance. When one of Machaut’s compositions (poetical, musical, or both) is preserved in more than one source, each such manuscript is considered as a performance in its own right. This performative approach allows for and indeed welcomes variations in interpretation and presentation, including those that appear to entail manipulations of the work itself, by performers as diverse as copyists (involved in internal, possibly mnemonic performance), oral interpreters (singing or reading out loud, either from memory or from a copy), editors (whatever their purpose and medium, be it a paper edition based on all sources or a digital edition of just one: perhaps these are the equivalent of today's copyists?), and readers (scholarly and leisurely, from any era). Having established this approach in my thesis, I then assess the role of the individuals involved in such a manuscript performance. The differing role of the scribes and the author in a manuscript's production is considered, particularly with reference to the manuscripts over whose compilation the author is perceived to have had some control. The role of the reader is considered in terms of the reception of the manuscript and especially the extent to which manuscript layout and design subconsciously ‘control’ reader interpretation. In the light of this I analyse the manuscript presentation of Machaut's songs in each of the six principal manuscripts transmitting his works, with particular focus on the literary works that contain musical notation, the Remede de Fortune and the Voir Dit, the series of lays set to music, and the Messe de Notre Dame. The methodology adopted throughout considers the visual impact of the presence of music on the manuscript page and assesses the extent of this impact both on the reader and on its relevance to manuscript design: what can the layout of the music tell us about the manuscript's readers, patrons and creators? This analysis offers insights as to the role of artists in the society of mid- and late-fourteenth-century France, the changing perceptions of words and music, and the role of reading, writing, and memory in society.

This thesis asks how stereotypical images of a foreign country are reinforced or contested through translation in the context of the contemporary consumer book market. Taking Italy and the British publishing market as its focus, it sets out to examine the translation process for one popular genre of Italian fiction and two Italian bestsellers published in Britain after 2000. Gomorra by Roberto Saviano (2006) and Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire by Melissa P. (2003) and the so-called ‘new Italian crime fiction’, are three recent Italian publishing phenomena that have been selected for translation into English. Once translated and distributed in the British market, they attracted significant commercial and critical attention in the literary field. How important was the association with stereotypical images of Italy in determining the success of these texts in Britain, a market that is famously resistant to translation? How was the idea of Italy re-negotiated and re-imagined throughout the translation process? In order to provide an answer to the above questions, both the translation and the paratranslation of the Italian texts are investigated. The translation of new Italian crime fiction is examined with a focus on the Italian and the British history of the genre and on its paratranslation. The fascinating implications of the new branding of the author Roberto Saviano, which emerged in the British literary field when Gomorra was translated into English, are explored in the context of both translation and paratranslation. Finally, in analysing the translation of Cento colpi I have focused on the work of the translator, Lawrence Venuti, and particularly on the implicationsthat his ideology of translation has on the idea of Italy and on that of “cultural difference” as they emerge from the target text. This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, in which theoretical understandings from Translation Studies, Italian Studies, studies of the contemporary book market and media culture are integrated. It uses translation as a method to look into the workings of the contemporary book market and, more generally, to shed light on contemporary representations of Italy that circulate in the large mass mediated textual space through the mirror of translation.

This dissertation focuses on the intercultural relations between the French-speaking and Dutch-speaking world in Holland in the first half of the fifteenth century. After a turbulent war of succession between the claimants Jacqueline of Bavaria and her uncle John the Pitiless, the counties of Holland, Zeeland and Hainault were incorporated into the largely francophone Burgundian empire. It has been suggested that this event marked the end of a flourishing period of cultural production in the Dutch vernacular at the court of Holland. However, as it seems, throughout the fifteenth century translations of French texts were produced for regional and local administrators. Possibly, the Burgundian regional government of Holland, which consisted of foreign as well as indigenous noblemen, may have played an important role in the dissemination of these texts. In this thesis, the subject is addressed by means of the contextualisation of the Middle Dutch version of Jean Froissart’s Chroniques. An analysis of documentary sources suggests that the comital residence at the Hague is best characterised as a multicultural environment inhabited by both bilingual and monolingual individuals. The results of an analysis of the variant readings in the French manuscripts of the Chroniques as compared to its Dutch counterpart show that the French manuscript which served as a model for the translation was probably produced between 1410 and 1418 by the Parisian libraire Pierre de Liffol. A comparison of the translated and original text shows that the translator wants to provide his readership with a text that is optimally intelligible and relevant to their context. Gerijt Potter’s modifications show that his intended audience was familiar with the habits of European courts and had a considerable geographical horizon. Because of the presence of doublets, repetitions and French loans, Potter’s style of writing resembles the official style of the comital chancery. However, a similar style is also found in other late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century translations. In The Hague the translation was probably dispersed (be it on a small scale) among members of the council and their contacts among the high nobility of Holland. Through the intensive contact between the regional councillors and members of local administration, the translation of the Chroniques became available to an audience in the cities.

Going beyond Orientalism in its examination of novels dealing with British colonisation in the West, as well as the East Indies, the postcolonial frame of my thesis develops recent theorisations of the Romantic ‘stranger’. Analysing a range of novels from the much anthologised Mansfield Park (1814), to less well-known narratives such as John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) and Sir Walter Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well (1823), my thesis seeks to account for a model of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ within fiction of the period. Considering the cosmopolitan dimensions of the transferential rhetoric of slavery, my thesis explores the ways in which, Jane Austen, Amelia Opie and Maria Edgeworth consider the position of women in domestic society through a West Indian frame. Demonstrating the need for reform both at home and abroad, such novels are representative of a fledgling cosmopolitanism that is often overlooked in current criticism. In seeking to account for ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ as a new model for reading fiction composed during the Romantic period, my thesis attempts to add further nuance to current understandings of sympathetic exchange during the process of British colonisation. In chapters four and five I will develop my analysis of novels dealing with colonial expansion in the Caribbean to consider novels which deal with the Indian subcontinent. Although stopping short of questioning colonial expansion, discourses of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’, as my thesis demonstrates, provided a foundation for humanitarian and cultural engagement which was mutually transformative for both the coloniser and the colonised.

This thesis addresses the contribution of Francesc Payarols and Andreu Nin to the Catalan literary system between 1928 and 1937 via the introduction of unmediated translations from Russian into Catalan. This contribution has been studied by comparing it to previous translation activity from Russian into Catalan, to translations in literary systems that due to prestige and geographical proximity can be considered neighbouring systems to the Catalan system (the French, the British and the Spanish), and by reviewing some of the critical reception that these publications gathered in the Catalan press of the time. Selected terminology and theoretical concepts of Polysystem Theory (PST) have been used critically in the methodological framing. This study occupies the gap of knowledge in current scholarship around the work of Payarols, whilst also building on previous and contemporaneous research on Nin. The evolution of translation from Russian into Catalan is contextualised from its introduction in 1879 until the establishment of Edicions Proa in 1928, the platform from which Payarols and Nin published the majority of the texts studied. The role of the translators as agents of the system is particularly highlighted, given both the influence of their translations in creating examples of models of prose that autochthonous novelists could use, and the power of their textual choices outside of the primary authors (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov). Joan Puig i Ferreter’s agency is also explored, as the figure behind Proa’s success and one of the main promoters of the reintroduction of novels into the literary repertoire in Catalan from the late 1920s. This research studies the unmediated Catalan translations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and a selection of nineteenth and twentieth century authors carried out by Payarols and Nin, and reviews some of the impact that these had upon Catalan writers such as Mercè Rodoreda, Sebastià Juan Arbó and Joan Sales. Overall, these translations largely exceeded the previous available items of Russian literature in Catalan, and in cases such as Dostoevsky and Chekhov, they established a textual presence to go with their already existing literary fame. This process establishes that power dynamics were in operation between these translators, and that Nin had higher esteem from the literary milieu, which in turn affected the prestige of the texts he was commissioned to translate. I then contribute to the debate on the mythologisation of Nin’s work by suggesting a revision of his texts, supported by a comparison with the recently revised versions of some of Payarols translations.

Since the first definition of “italiano neostandard” appeared in the Eighties, more and more often “neostandard” forms, while already present in common speech, feature today in the written media, and even find their space in contemporary grammaticography. Through a corpus-based analysis, this dissertation aims at assessing the vitality of the neostandard as it appears in the written columns of three daily papers during a selected period of time in 2007. In particular, two phenomena are explored: the usage of the clitics ci, ne and lo in function of case marker (marca complementare); and the tendency to reduce the use of the subjunctive in epistemic modality. This contribution proposes the integration of different approaches into one interpretation of mechanism of cliticization as a continuum which goes from facultative usages of case markers to obligatory ones. In the second case the phenomenon of reduction of usage of epistemic subjunctive is described here as a reorganization (ristrutturazione). According to this study, within the category of epistemic subjunctive it is necessary to distinguish particular contexts after which the subjunctive preserves its status from the ones in which tends to be substituted by the indicative or the conditional.

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.