In this thesis, I am developing a theory of the translingual imagination which can be used as a tool to explore literature written in a second language. The term ‘translingual imagination’ was first coined by Steven Kellman in his essay ‘Translingualism and the Literary Imagination’, describing the work of authors writing in a language other than their first. Recent years have seen a growing body of research on these writers, not least because of a risen interest in post-colonial writing and transnational and migration studies. Literary scholars have increasingly questioned ‘the paradigma of monolingualism’, and linguistic research has looked at interrelations between migration,language and identity. However, research projects have often focused on prose writing, predominantly examining the work of canonized male authors (such as Kafka, Conrad or Rushdie), and post-war migrants(such as Turkish-born authors writing in German, or South American-born writers writing in English). Poetry written by women poets of German-Jewish origin has mainly been considered part of Holocaust writing, and over the past decades German scholars have been trying to reclaim these texts as ‘German -Jewish’ poetry. My thesis considers the work of four English poets of German-Jewish origin in the context of translingual writing. While using Kellman’s term, I shall suggest a set of specific criteria to allow for a clearer definition of the ‘translingual imagination’. In applying these criteria to the work of women poets of German-Jewish origin, I will not only show the translingual imagination at work but also encourage a new reading of literature written by German-Jewish refugees that goes beyond the notion of exile poetry.

This thesis examines representations of space, place and landscape in English and German-language poetry of the period 1960-1975, a key transitional phase between modernity and postmodernity. It proposes that the impact certain transnational spatial revolutions had on contemporary poetry can only be fully grasped with recourse to comparative methodologies which look across national borders. This is demonstrated by a series of paired case studies which examine the work of J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan, Sarah Kirsch and Derek Mahon, and Ernst Jandl and Edwin Morgan. Prynne and Celan’s 'Sprachskepsis' is the starting point for a post-structuralist analysis of meta-textual space in their work, including how poetry’s complex tectonics addresses multifaceted crises of representation. Mahon and Kirsch’s work is read in the context of spatial division, and it is argued that both use representations of landscape, space and place to express political engagement, and to negotiate fraught ideas of home, community and world. Jandl and Morgan’s representations of space and place, which often depend on experimental lyric subjectivity, are examined: it is argued that poetic subject(s) which speak from multiple perspectives (or none) serve as a means of reconfiguring poetry’s relationship to space at a time when social, literary and political boundaries were being redefined. The thesis thus highlights hitherto underexplored connections between a range of poets working across the two language areas, making clear that space and place is a vital critical category for understanding poetry of this period, including both experimental and non-experimental work. It reveals weaknesses in existing critical taxonomies, arguing for the use of ‘late modernist’ as category with cross-cultural relevance, and promotes methodological exchange between the Anglophone and German traditions of landscape, space and place-oriented poetry scholarship, to the benefit of both.

This thesis examines the vernacular psychology presented in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. It focuses on the concept 'hugr', generally rendered in English as ‘mind, soul, spirit’, and explores the conceptual relationships between emotion, cognition and the body. It argues that despite broad similarities, Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English vernacular psychology differ more than has previously been acknowledged. Furthermore, it shows that the psychology of Old Norse-Icelandic has less in common with its circumpolar neighbours than proposed by advocates of Old Norse-Icelandic shamanism. The thesis offers a fresh interpretation of Old Norse-Icelandic psychology which does not rely on cross-cultural evidence from other Germanic or circumpolar traditions. In particular, I demonstrate that emotion and cognition were not conceived of ‘hydraulically’ as was the case in Old English, and that 'hugr' was not thought to leave the body either in animal form or as a person’s breath. I show that Old Norse-Icelandic psychology differs from the Old English tradition, and argue that the Old English psychological model is a specific elaboration of the shared psychological inheritance of Germanic whose origins require further study. These differences between the two languages have implications for the study of psychological concepts in Proto-Germanic, as I argue that there are fewer semantic components which can be reliably reconstructed for the common ancestor of the North and West Germanic languages. As a whole, the thesis applies insights from cross-cultural linguistics and psychology in order to show how Old Norse-Icelandic psychological concepts differ not only from contemporary Germanic and circumpolar traditions but also from the Present Day English concepts used to describe them. The thesis comprises four chapters and conclusion. Chapter 1 introduces the field of study and presents the methodologies and sources used. It introduces the range of cross-cultural variety in psychological concepts, and places Old Norse-Icelandic 'hugr' and its Old English analogue 'mōd' in a typological perspective. Chapter 2 reviews previous approaches to early Germanic psychology and introduces the major strand of research that forms the background to this study: Lockett’s (2011) proposal that Old English vernacular psychology operated in terms of a ‘hydraulic model’, where the 'mōd' would literally boil and seethe within a person’s chest in response to strong emotions. Chapter 3 outlines the native Old Norse-Icelandic psychological model by examining indigenously produced vernacular texts. It looks first at the claims that 'hugr' could leave the body in animal form or as a person’s breath. It then describes the relationship between emotion, cognition and the body in Old Norse-Icelandic texts and contrasts this with the Old English system. Chapter 4 examines the foreign influences which could potentially account for the differences between the Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic systems. It looks first at the imported medical traditions which were known in medieval Scandinavia at the time Old Norse-Icelandic texts were being committed to writing. Next it considers the psychology of Christian tradition from the early Old Icelandic Homily Book to late-fourteenth-century devotional poetry. Finally, it examines the representation of emotion and the body in the translated Anglo-Norman and Old French texts produced at the court of Hákon Hákonarson and explores how this was transposed to native romances composed in Old Norse-Icelandic. The conclusion summarises the findings of the thesis and presents a proposal for the methodology of studying medieval psychological concepts with directions for further research.

This practice-based research investigates the relationship between the process of making layered images and narratives of walked journeys. Two such journeys – Franz Schubert’s song cycle, Winterreise, and the autobiographical account of John Clare’s escape from an asylum, Reccolections &c Of Journey From Essex – were examined and compared through a body of drawings, prints and paintings. A study of the construction of the two narratives highlighted their layered composition: Winterreise is experienced as a synthesis of Wilhelm Müller’s poems and Schubert’s musical setting; whilst the full impact of Clare’s account is appreciated in the context of his poetry and biography. The research began with a bookwork, a visual response to the layering of information observed in the song cycle of Winterreise, and led to the formulation of a method of interpreting narratives using Thomas De Quincey’s model of The Palimpsest. De Quincey identified the effacements, amendments and aggregation of material in a palimpsest manuscript with the absorption of experience. In paintings made to interpret the experience of Winterreise, abrading layers of a picture surface elicited the compound characteristics of the narrative: allowing one idea to be seen through another. The fictive identity of the song cycle emerged in a suite of monoprints, through their assembly of layered imagery. Conversely, John Clare’s account is that of an actual journey, physically walked. The research culminated in a focus on the terrain of the two narratives. The metaphorical landscape of Winterreise is contrasted with Clare’s more visceral relationship with earth and trees through a series of paintings based on Journey From Essex. The research discovered new possibilities in the narratives’ meaning through the invention of a visual language to describe both physical nature of walking and a distinctive sense of place.

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.

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.

In 1989 the American Surrealist associated painter, sculptor, and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) suggested an intermedial dimension to her multifaceted œuvre in her essay ‘Some Parallels in Word and Pictures.’ Taking this essay as a critical point of departure, this thesis offers an intertextual theorisation of Tanning’s practice. It concerns the role of narrative in her work, and the way in which she borrows from the histories of art and literature as source materials. The thesis presented here is that Tanning’s work from the context of Surrealism and beyond makes reference to the fairy tales and other, more extensive works of literature which she read in her youth whilst at work in her public library in Galesburg, Illinois, whether implicitly in visual references or explicitly in her works’ titles. Throughout, the library is read as a key source of inspiration. This is true too of the impact which Tanning’s belated visit to the Louvre had on her post-Surrealist stylistic development. Broadly, this thesis aims to rethink the methodologies used to interpret Surrealism, and reunite the literary and visual aspects upon which the Surrealist movement was initially founded. This interdisciplinary approach contributes fresh perspectives by marrying the history of Surrealism with that of the fairy tale, including that of Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, and the fairy tale illustrations of Gustave Doré, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, and John Tenniel. The anti-fairy tale emerges as useful critical tool in defining the intertext which appears when Surrealism and the fairy tale are paired. The ‘demythologising’ project of Angela Carter is useful to call upon in the articulation of the anti-fairy tale, and her work is easily placed in dialogue with that of Tanning, especially in terms of its feminist leanings. The dialogic, intertextual theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, further developed by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, support this reading of Tanning’s visual narratives. More recently such theories of intertextuality have manifested themselves in the work of Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal who proposes a model of ‘preposterous history’ in order to creatively re-read the relationship between source (or pre-text) and intertext. This research is primarily text-based and devotes long-awaited attention to Tanning’s literary works which are read visually, including her short story ‘Blind Date’ (1943), and her novel 'Abyss' (1977), later reworked and republished as 'Chasm: A Weekend' (2004). I argue that her novel provides textual continuity with her Surrealist visual narratives of the 1940s creating a more cyclical, ‘preposterous’ shape to her career than has previously been acknowledged.

This study explores how education and the medieval intellectual and pedagogical discipline of 'grammatical' developed in Iceland during the medieval period, defined roughly from the official conversion to Christianity c.1000 to the Reformation c.1550, The first chapter deals with social, institutional, and financial aspects of teaching and learning in medieval Iceland, surveying key figures and places, but also arguing that more attention shoulder be paid to the costs of learning and the effect of that on poor students. The second chapter addresses Latin education, discussing the importance of Latinity in medieval Iceland and the types of education that would involve Latin. It also addresses the idea of bilingual education and suggests ways in which extant venacular writings can provide evidence for how Latin was taught and learned using the vernacular, using the model of Old English bilingual education. Finally, the third chapter addresses vernacular topics of learning, focusing on the development of a venacular \(grammatical\) which is focused on the interpretation and normalization of Old Norse texts, rather than the understanding and use of Latin. Discussing these three components of educational history together is fundamental to understanding the intellectual and pedagogical dynamics behind the extant medieval Icelandic textual corpus.

‘The Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Carlyle’s French Revolution’ examines the work of Thomas Carlyle as a crucial aesthetic intervention in the modern reception of the French Revolution in Europe. It interrogates the prevalent critical constructions of Carlyle’s work and finds them to proceed predominantly from the Whig historical agenda, structured around such key nineteenth-century concepts as utilitarianism and civilisational and moral progress. Within this critical framework, Carlyle’s largely conservative cultural stance and Christian spirituality are hardly allowed any creative potential and, ever since the famous fabrication of James Anthony Froude who depicted Carlyle as ‘a Calvinist without the theology’, they have been perceived as artistically-stunted, irrational, and out of touch with the nineteenth-century political, social and cultural realities. In examining Carlyle’s involvement with German Romanticism on the one hand, and with contemporary British periodical press on the other, this thesis proposes a more comprehensive reading of Carlyle’s politics, aesthetics and spirituality in an attempt to represent his radically open, catholic and indeed cosmopolitan artistic agenda which taps into the Scottish Enlightenment concept of rationality, Calvinist scepticism towards nineteenth-century progressivism and acute perception of evil in this world, and post-Burkean Romantic aesthetics of the sublime. We chart the aesthetic movement from Carlyle’s early dialogue with Schiller and Goethe to ‘The Diamond Necklace’, Carlyle’s first artistic rendition of the French pre-revolutionary scene, delivered as a (Gothic) moral tale and anticipating The French Revolution (a historical work that uniquely employs the Gothic genre within historical narrative, arguably unparalleled in British post-Burkean Romanticism). The critical reception of The French Revolution in Britain is examined, with special attention paid to the highly unfavourable review by Herman Merivale in The Edinburgh Review, in order to challenge the Whig line in Carlylean criticism and to expose the fundamental artistic, political and moral disagreement between Carlyle and Merivale. Carlyle’s Calvinist stance sees both Merivale’s and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s facile exorcism of the categories of good and evil from their historical agendas as irrational given the recent French terror (which, in Carlyle’s reading, released its demons precisely through such a botched ethical deal). Similarly, I highlight Carlyle’s close dialogue with John Stuart Mill both in their correspondence, and in the publications in the London and Westminster Review, while I argue that this intellectual exchange is crucial for the reading of The French Revolution as a text challenging Mill’s utilitarianism, and written within the institutional framework of the contemporary periodical press. Finally, Carlyle is seen to make capital of the concepts of Gothic and sublime, introduced by Edmund Burke and popularised by the Anti-Jacobin Review in Britain, by applying them directly to the French mob in search of a new spiritual tongue for his times (a move that even a nineteenth-century radical liberal thinker such as Mill sees as politically, if not artistically, far too subversive and revolutionary). Creative non-conclusiveness and playful deconstruction of the prevalent post-revolutionary narratives of 1789 characterise Carlyle’s deeply spiritual and artistically-sophisticated text, which, in an orthodox Christian reading, rejoices in the messy, dark and complex residue of human history, through which Christian providence acts in mysterious and unexpected ways that do not allow for any simple, de-mythologised reading.