F.W. Harvey’s poetry was more popular during the First World War than many – if not most – of those whom we celebrate as ‘the war poets’ today. He is unique among the poets of that war for his insight into the life of the British POW in Germany, and for the influence of his work in the first of the British trench journals, the 5th Gloucester Gazette. Yet, he has received little national attention since his death in 1957, and scholarly work on his life is lacking, largely owing to a deficit of publicly-available primary sources and original material regarding his life and works. This has resulted in a failure to place him properly within the literary canon of the First World War. The recent discovery of Harvey’s papers allows us to examine his life and his contemporary cultural impact, and more fully to evaluate the value of his work and what it tells us about the First World War experience. Using Harvey’s papers, this biographical study will reconstruct the historical details of his life as they relate to the First World War. Concurrently, it will develop our understanding of his war-related work. This will demonstrate Harvey’s influence during the war, first as a trench poet, then as the poetic voice of the British POW. It will also examine how Harvey’s work continued to be affected by the war in the years after the armistice. The result will be a greater appreciation of the life and importance of a First World War poet whose voice was in danger of being lost to time.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the fictional and non-fictional literary works of two Taiwanese eco-environmental writers Liu Kexiang and Wu Mingyi in the context of the transformation of interpersonal sphere. Eco-environmental literature represents a significant literary trend that has been pursued in Taiwan at the end of the 20th century. It develops Taiwanese literary tradition in a new way through the reflection of Western and Eastern theories in the domestic context and Taiwanese cultural specifics from the perspective of natural history and scientific knowledge. The first part of the thesis summarizes academic discussions on the topic of eco- environmental literature. This is characterized by the initial insufficient theoretical basis of Taiwanese environmental studies, the desire to maintain this trend beyond purely literary criticism, the assumption of Western environmental discourse theories, and the involvement of writers themselves in theoretical discussions and the gradual shift to ecocriticism. It also puts it in a historical context and explores its dominant topics. The analytical part of the thesis is based on the theory of modernity of British sociologist Anthony Giddens. It analyzes works based on the sources of modernity, which are time-space distanciation, disembedding of...

By setting the writings of Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit into dialogue with those of the New England Transcendentalists, this thesis proposes a New Transcendentalism that both reinvigorates and reimagines Transcendentalist thought for our increasingly intersectional and deterritorialized contemporary context. Drawing on key re-readings by Stanley Cavell, George Kateb and Branka Arsić, the project contributes towards the twenty-first-century shift in Transcendentalist scholarship which seeks to challenge the popular image of New England Transcendentalism as uncompromisingly individualist, abstract and ultimately the preserve of white male privilege. Moreover, in its identification and examination of an interrelated poetics and politics of liminality across these old and new Transcendentalist writings, the project also extends the scope of a more recent strain of Transcendentalist scholarship which emphasises the dialogical underpinnings of the nineteenth-century movement. The project comprises three central chapters, each of which situates New Transcendentalism within a series of vertical and lateral dialogues. The trajectory of my chapters follows the logic of Emerson s ever-widening circles , in that each takes a wider critical lens through which to explore the dialogical relationship between my four writers and the New England Transcendentalists. In Chapter 1 the focus is upon anthropological theories of liminality; in Chapter 2 upon feminist interventions within psychoanalysis; and in Chapter 3 upon the revisionary work of Post-West criticism. In keeping with the dialogical analogies that inform this project throughout, the relationship examined within this thesis between Adnan, Dillard, Robinson and Solnit and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists is understood as itself reciprocal, in that it not only demonstrates how my four contemporary writers may be read productively in the light of their New England forebears, but also how those readings in turn invite us to reconsider our understanding of those earlier thinkers.

The thesis is based on questionnaire survey conducted among 136 so called "green and colourful" respondents. The term "the colourful and the green" comes from the professor of environmental sociology, Hana Librová, and refers to people living the ecologically beneficial lifestyle that can be characterized by voluntary or intentional modesty. The target of the survey was to find out whether these people are influenced in their lifestyle by books or which books would articulate their worldview the best; what books they resonate with. Often repeated titles formed a "green influential literary canon" that is further analyzed in the thesis. First, the canon as a whole is examined, second the three most frequent books are studied with an ecocritical approach. In the canon, a minimum titles from the field of deep ecology, nature writing as well as science fiction or utopia were registered. Despite the expectation, there were many books related to New Age movement in the canon as well as pop-cultural spiritual writings. Nevertheless, books concerning native americans, together with eco- philosophical works largely dominated. Functions that the publications fulfill for the readers are seen as a clamp of diverse books in the canon. There are three main functions defined and further explained:...