No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation focuses on the function of human bodies in articulations of the nation in contemporary British multicultural fiction, more specifically in novels by Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, and Monica Ali. Combining the Andersonean claim that narrative fiction is an especially sensitive medium for imagining the nation with Daniel Punday‘s assertion that the human body is the basic organizing principle of narrative structure, this study examines the ways in which corporeal representations in novels negotiate dominant paradigms of the national imaginary. Each chapter focuses on a key text from which it opens up the discussion to the authors‘ oeuvre. The study establishes the palimpsest as a mode of representation and interpretation of cultural and national identities showcased in Rushdie‘s The Moor‘s Last Sigh. The fragmentation of narrative and human subjectivity via the trope of the palimpsest in this novel is central to conceptualizations of the nation in Rushdie‘s oeuvre as well as in the other texts in this study. Based on the make-up of Rushdie‘s palimpsests, the characters‘ bodies manifest not a mixture of different elements but a conglomerate of often mutually exclusive, yet intrinsically combined alternatives. For V. S. Naipaul, the function of corporeality is the negotiation of the national imaginary via representations of narrative space. In The Enigma of Arrival as in his other novels, Naipaul uses circuitous movement and palimpsestic layering of the kinetic space to complicate agency for his characters, to emphasize the illusory nature of narrative authority, and to call attention to the ambiguous operations of national and postcolonial discourse. Hanif Kureishi‘s The Body among his other novels shows a ground-breaking attitude toward the possibilities of narrativity in the age of transmutable corporeality. His characters‘ diminishing corporeal presence is the source of their agency and their increasingly complex cultural identifications. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali‘s keen attention to kinetic space creates unexpected ripples in the narration and the protagonist‘s cultural identification, which shift the meaning of the novel from an optimistic ethnic/gender emancipation narrative to claiming agency by resisting cultural affiliations. / English

The Catherine Byron Letters is an edited and annotated collection of letters mostly exchanged between Catherine Byron, the mother of the poet, and her solicitor John Hanson. The importance of this correspondence was first established by Doris Langley-Moore in Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (1974), which documents the poet's finances from the time of his birth. Since then the letters have been used extensively by Megan Boyes in My Amiable Mamma: A Biography of Mrs. Catherine Gordon Byron (1991) and by J. V. Beckett and Sheila Aley in Byron and Newstead: The Aristocrat and the Abbey (2001). For this project I have transcribed and edited the portion of Catherine Byron's correspondence now in the John Murray Archives at the National Library of Scotland, amounting to 92 letters which are here reproduced in their entirety. While some are familiar letters, most of the correspondence is concerned with the business of providing for the young poet's education at Harrow and at Cambridge, paying off his mounting debts, managing the Newstead Abbey estate, and pursuing the lawsuits which entangled the family finances. I have edited the transcribed letters using the TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) markup language, adding optional punctuation where necessary to clarify the sense as well as headnotes and additional annotations for personal names, places, and technical terms where they require elucidation. The resulting machine-readable XML documents have been made into a website on which I have collaborated with Professor Radcliffe. / Master of Arts

No description available.

Nineteenth-century British fiction is often dismissed as necrophillic or obsessed with death. While the label of necrophilia is an apt description of the fetishistic representations of dead women prevalent at the end of the century, it is too narrow to fit literature produced earlier in the century. This is not to say that abnormal attitudes toward death are only a feature of the late nineteenth century. In fact, pathological attitudes toward death abound in the literature, but the relationship between the deceased and the survivor is not always sexual in nature. Rather, there is a clear shift in attitudes, from the chaste death fantasy, or attraction to the idea of death, prevalent in Gothic works, to the destructive, stagnant mourning visible in mid-century texts, and culminating in the perverse sexualization of dead women at the turn of the century. This literary shift is most likely attributable to the concurrent changes in attitudes toward sex and death. As sex became more acceptable, more public, via the channels of scientific discourse, death became a less acceptable idea. This “denial of death” is a direct reaction to the religious uncertainties brought about by industrialization. As scientists and industrialists uncovered increasing evidence against a literal interpretation of the Bible, more people began to doubt the nature of God and the existence of an afterlife. If there was no God, then there was no heaven, which raised questions about what happened to the soul after death. With the certainty of an afterlife gone, death became mysterious, something to fear, and the passing of loved ones was doubly-mourned as their fate was now uncertain.

Thesis abstract: Despite the fact that some critics view the period of the true Gothic as ending in the year 1820, others consider it to be a genre, as well as an aesthetic, which can still be perceived across various different cultural aspects to this day. Possibly the best way to approach the Gothic within the realm of literature is to observe several key examples of the Gothic topos, which was grounded in the original Gothic pieces of the eighteenth century. During the course of the nineteenth century, a historical period which from the cultural point of view appears almost inherently Gothic, British Gothic writing has undergone considerable changes and development, maintaining several of the key Gothic features, namely those of setting, isolation, and character types, modifying them in the process. Through this, it can be observed to what extent the aspects remain, and just how far-reaching their transformation was within the six exemplary works - Frankenstein, The Vampyre, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Carmilla, and Dracula. Another important aspect overlaying the selected works is that of monstrosity - a rather physical interpretation of the inner monstrosities of humans, or indeed an entire culture. The literary works, no matter how different at first glance they may appear to be, all utilize typical...