Ulm, Univ., Diss., 2009.

The Books of Catullus consists of a completely new translation of Catullus’s poems divided into the three ‘books’ some scholars have agreed is the right order of the poems. These ‘books’ are divided as book one 1-60, book two 61-64, book three 65-116. This main text is prefaced by six essays: ‘Starting Line,’ ‘The Flâneur: Catullus, Martial, Baudelaire, Frank O’Hara,’ ‘Catullus and Modernism,’ ‘The Question of Voice in Catullus,’ ‘The Accessibility of Catullus,’ and ‘Sourcing the Origin: Translations of Catullus since 1950’. The essays together have an aesthetic of their own, reflecting what I take to be the most important features in ‘the books’ of Catullus: the key feature is a flâneurist wandering. The essays are speculative and diverse in their enquiry, and are not only representative of the ‘matter’ of thought which was going on behind the translations, but also represent the ‘form’ and circumstances that that thinking took place in. So the essays wander through and around questions relating to the gaze, collecting, ‘occasion’ and voice, the modern and Modernism, the contemporary, accessibility and difficulty, coterie and the evolution and practice of translation itself, in general, and in relation to Catullus in particular. If the essays wander (and wonder) in these ways, as a flâneur might conduct his perambulations, they also reflect the ‘form’ of the ‘books’. The poems are anchored by metrical form, they ‘wander’ around, through and across other possible categorical orderings as diverse as genre (lyric, elegy, epigram, hymn, translation, verse-letter, ‘epyllion,’ etc.); theme (love, loss, friendship, rivalry, marriage, adultery, politics, sexuality, etc.); length (the poems vary in length from two lines to in excess of four hundred), and so on. George A. Sheets in his essay ‘Elements of Style in Catullus’ (Skinner 2007, 190) sums up the poems in this way: ‘the single most characteristic aspect of Catullan “style” is its protean character’. Other epithets can be added: quotidian, contingent, exploratory, speculative. The essays, therefore, reflect this ‘protean character’ of the poems in how they address the reader: they can be chatty, informal, formal, comical, serious, academic, intellectual (and intelligent), playful, precise, digressive, ‘occasional,’ accessible, difficult, ‘modern’ – all rich characteristics of the poems – in short the art of the poems can be found in the expression of the essays.

This dissertation examines the representation of self in the poetry of Violet Jacob (1863-1946) and Marion Angus (1865-1946), two Scottish poets who wrote primarily in Scots in the inter-war years. Until recently, many critics have dismissed the work of Jacob and Angus as 'minor' in its themes or significant only as it anticipates the Scots poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. The general absence of their work from print, and the narrow range of their poems appearing in anthologies, support the impression that their poetry is limited in scope. This dissertation suggest that in fact their poetry makes a significant contribution to the development of Scottish poetry. Their work builds upon Scottish literary traditions, interpolating balladic form and language into their lyrics, and drawing upon the rich folksong and dramatic monologue traditions as models for representing voice and self. Folk belief, too, informs their work, providing a symbolic background for many poems. To indicate the depth to their work, the thesis considers their poetry in a range of broader, interrelated contexts. By situating their poetry within historical, sociological, and literary milieus, and by placing their poems within a continuum of Scottish writing, one can discern key tensions underlying and informing their work. As the predominance of first-person speakers in their poetry indicates, Jacob and Angus shared an interest in the psychology of the poetic self. Each poem offers a different representation of self, highlighting what the poetic self utters (or omits) in response to the world around it. Drawing upon a range of contemporaneous commentary and contemporary critical theory, the thesis analyzes how both poets portray the self in relation to its interior sense of time, its conception of space, and its interaction with other selves. The thesis falls into two parallel halves - the first devoted to an investigation of the self in Jacob's work, the second in Angus's. Key similarities and differences in each author's technique become evident in comparing their work.

In this review of a body of literary journalism and historical writing over three decades, the author identifies shared epistemological and methodological challenges between these areas. The research questions arose out of the author’s three historical books, ‘Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness’ (1989), ‘The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage’ (1992) and ‘Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright: Puritan Child, Native Daughter and Mother Superior’ (2011) and a selection of related journalism. The research questions related to how historians and literary journalists identify subjects as marginal and central; what methodologies are employed in their investigations and their writing; the centrality of an inter-disciplinary approach to narrative writing in both fields and how the professional authority faces significant challenges of identity and methodology in the digital age.

This review of eight years of research into digital media addresses the methodological and epistemological issues and tensions arising out of the emergence of new communicative spaces that have expanded the range of actors involved in the construction of the news. Until recently, journalism has developed as a relatively closed professional culture for the production of knowledge, based on a system of editorial control. Yet digital media technologies have disrupted established concepts of communication, prevailing notions of space and time and the distinction between public and private spheres. The research in this portfolio highlights elements of change and continuity in the way journalists think about and engage in their work, through processes of adaptation shaped by cultural, social, economic and technological factors. The work reveals how far participatory media technologies are transforming how journalists and audiences relate to the news in a profession where norms and routines that have remained, until now, decidedly consistent. But it goes beyond a focus on journalists as a distinct group to advance ideas about how the media environment itself is being reconfigured, particularly due to the development of social media. The research presented here on Twitter reveals how news and information have become woven into social awareness streams that represent a constantly updated public account of the experiences, interests and opinions shared by the platform’s users. They are able to reframe or reinterpret messages through networked platforms that extend the dissemination of news through social interaction, infusing hybridity in news production, selection and dissemination.

This thesis is a literary investigation of sacrifice in works of tragic literature and the Bible. In Part I, this thesis critiques René Girard’s scapegoating model of sacrifice and demonstrates the interpretive limitations that his theory of sacrifice imposes upon works of tragic literature and the Bible. In the first chapter, this thesis examines Eurpides’ play The Bacchae. Contrary to Girard’s assessment of works of classical Greek tragedy as texts that come to the defense of the tragic victim, I argue that this play participates in an elaborate re-mystification of scapegoating. Next, I conduct a tragic reading of the first twelve chapters of Exodus—focusing specifically on the birth of Moses and the story of the Passover. Contrary to a Girardian reading which simplifies the conflicts in Exodus to an irreducible opposition between Egypt and Israel, a tragic reading of the biblical narrative reveals a much more complex relationship between these groups. Using Christopher Fry’s play The Firstborn as a literary framework for investigating the biblical narrative, I read Moses as a tragic figure who struggles to come to grips with his own identity as a man raised by Egyptians and yet born an Israelite. Most importantly, Fry’s play dramatically highlights the sacrificial costs of the Israelites’ deliverance in Exodus—namely the infanticidal genocide of the firstborn of Egypt. In Part II of this study, I describe an alternative to Girard’s model of sacrifice which appears in the Gospel of Mark as well as in the work of Flannery O’Connor. In my reading of the Gospel of Mark as a work of Christian tragedy, I argue that at the Last Supper Jesus poetically improvises a model of eucharistic sacrifice that radically reconfigures the relationship between humans and the divine. According to this eucharistic model of sacrifice, the sacred is configured within the very materials of artistic representation. Consequently, the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel not only transfigures the opposition between oppressors and the oppressed but most importantly the opposition between the sacred and the profane. This study concludes with an investigation of the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. Through a close reading of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Wise Blood, I argue that O’Connor’s work employs a model of eucharistic sacrifice to bring about a moment of transfiguration that defies interpretive closure. Finally, this thesis argues that by exploring this eucharistic model of sacrifice it may be possible to conceive of new approaches to imagining the relationship between readers, texts and the sacred.

This thesis aims to characterize the poetics of partial sight. It first places these poetics within a theoretical framework and then enacts them in a collection of poems. The thesis treats partial sight not primarily as a physiological fact but rather as symbolic of the limitations of human vision. It draws inspiration from the Homeric epics, which acknowledge these limits and show the dependency they bring, whether on the Muse or on other factors external to the poet’s conscious self, as central to poetic composition. The persistent trope of the blind poet, who loses his sight but gains creative vision, highlights links between partial sight and the partial apprehension that poets experience as they engage with an emerging poem. Both situations highlight the partial nature of human perception in a mysterious world and both necessitate dependency on factors beyond the self for success. Critically and creatively the thesis charts an evolving awareness of the importance of partial sight in poetic composition. This awareness has gradually inspired perspectival and methodological changes. The project began as a desire to challenge those poetic representations of blindness that cast it less as a valuable creative perspective than as a symbol of anxiety about dependency and consequent lack of agency. Early versions of the thesis sought to challenge this pattern by asserting the selfhood of figures with visual impairment as part of a disability-based identity poetics. This practice encouraged the use of relatively closed forms that stressed a speaker’s personal vision. However, as the thesis developed it took more account of the power dynamics that underpin poetic form. It became apparent that an overly closed approach could undermine the project’s aims by replicating poetic practices that have facilitated the use of blindness in poetry as an edifying spectacle for sighted readers. Such formal choices can also create a sense of certainty that troubles an aesthetic of partial sight. Moreover, the thesis argues that to confine discussions of partial sight to identity poetics radically restricts our understanding of the poetics of partial sight, dependency and open forms and leaves these poetics insufficiently imagined. It draws on the work of Alan Grossman, Rae Armantrout and Larry Eigner among others, to reimagine partial sight and dependency as a route to poetic knowledge. The poetry collection moves from exploring partial sight as a source of identity to using the combination of partial sight and dependency as a generative principle. Different poems express this principle through troubled syntax, variable lineation and the deformation by erasure of pre-existing texts on blindness. The thesis seeks to demonstrate that partial sight and dependency are experiences shared by, and relevant to, all writers and readers of poetry. It returns to an earlier understanding of these factors, which sees them not as sources of social anxiety, but rather as creative catalysts that open the way to new poetic possibilities. In so doing it aims to challenge understandings not only of poetics but also of the meaning of disability.

The thesis seeks to account for the development of the Party's views of the contemporary novel and its expectations of the form after Socialist Realism (1949-1955). The course of development of Party requirements of the form is traced from 1959, when the Party announced its new operative ideology at the Third Congress, to its last major statement of demands at the Party Writers' Conference of February 1985. One of the salient features of the thesis is the attempt to reconstruct Party thinking on the novel through access to hitherto unknown materials for the period from the Party and Censorship Office archives. This enables the lack of specificity inherent in the Party's formulations after the demise of Socialist Realism to be countered, and a more definite account of the progression of Party thinking to be delineated. Chapter 1 defines, firstly, the administrative structures within which writers were required to operate - the Writers' Union, Ministry of Culture, the Central Committee's Cultural Department and, finally, the Censorship Office. Secondly, it considers the positive mechanisms devised by the state to encourage novel-writing on favoured topics, and thirdly, the aims of the Party's cultural programme. Chapter 2 provides a general cultural background of the period, describing the development of the term 'committed literature', which was most frequently used by writers and politicians in their deliberations on the nature and direction literature was to take. This development was influenced by the increasing restrictions which the authorities placed upon writers' freedom of interpretation. These concerned, above all, the problem of alienation in socialist society. Chapter 3-5 discuss six works in relation to the administrative structures and the major political issues of the period. In Chapter 3, the question of the Party's initial definition of the extent of freedoms is considered in relation to Roman Bratny's Szczes lwi, torturowani (1959) and Jerzy Putrament's Pasierbowie (1963).

Drawing together a range of visual and textual materials, this thesis explores the multiple social, political and cultural meanings of the workhouse in the period 1834-1900. Chapter one discusses the ideas of cleanliness and dirt that were so intrinsically associated with the institution and analyses them in relation to the representation of the workhouse poor. In chapter two, I focus upon the representation of the workhouse master, a figure associated with cruelty and abuse. I suggest that satirical attacks on this Poor-Law official neutralised his threat by constructing an aura of ridicule that was impossible to shake off. Chapter three analyses the accounts of middle-class visitors who traversed the workhouse space and argues that these texts fed into the construction of a bourgeois sense of self. Finally, chapter four examines visual representations of the workhouse, exploring the ideologies embedded within these images and tracing how they shifted across the century. In its focus upon the multiple and contradictory depictions of the workhouse that circulated throughout the period, the thesis demonstrates the culturally-constructed nature of the institution and argues that analysis of these various representations sheds light upon their cultural moments of production. Overall, the thesis makes the case that workhouse representations provide an insight into the issues and anxieties of nineteenth-century society.

This thesis traces the emergence of a distinct literary tradition of female-authored short fiction in Wales. It knits together a range of theoretical frameworks, including travel writing theories, ethnography and auto-ethnography, and ecofeminism, in order to adequately describe, elucidate and critique the evolution of the form from the late 1830s to the present day. The Introduction looks at the history of the theory of short fiction, especially the work of Frank O’Connor and Clare Hanson, as well as European models. Chapter One explores the interrelations between an emergent short fiction form, the sketch and travel literature, through the lenses of imperial travel writing theories, home tour writing, the sketch and Sandra A. Zagarell’s ‘narrative of community’. Chapter Two looks at writers from the 1920s to 1950, examining the ways in which discourses of anthropology, specifically ethnography and auto-ethnography, combined with further elements of Zagarell’s theories, can shed light on narrative techniques and recurrent tropes. Chapter Three examines the politically volatile period of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing particularly on the ways in which short fiction is caught up in debates surrounding ecofeminism, the environment and women’s bodies. The final chapter looks at current trends in contemporary short fiction, especially language loss, devolution and a sense of belonging. This chapter also considers how recent prestigious competitions are shaping trends in short fiction, as well as uncovering recurring metaphors which tie into movements in wider feminist theory, such as Adrienne Rich’s work on salvage and recovery. The conclusion looks ahead to new directions in both theoretical stances and the form itself, such as electronic publishing and further avenues for recovering material.