Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field.

This study explores the manifestation of piety and sensuality in the operas Manon and Thaïs by Jules Massenet. These two themes are prevalent in Massenet’s operas as well as his oratorios, although it is not clear why this is so. His admiration and love for the human voice and his ability to compose beautiful melodies are reflected in the fact that he composed primarily for the lyric theatre. Piety and sensuality in Manon and Thaïs are articulated predominantly by the eponymous female characters. In order to understand the characters and the motivations that steer their lives, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the socio-historical context of piety and sensuality. This understanding was reached through means of a traditional literature review, which also shed light on the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist and its influence on Massenet and his work. This is a hermeneutic study conducted in light of an interpretive paradigm. The libretti of Manon and Thaïs were explored by means of a close reading to identify sections dominated by piety and sensuality. Following the example of Lawrence Kramer, a combination of close reading and analysis was used to look at the ways in which piety and sensuality are articulated in the music. It became clear that Massenet used various compositional techniques to differentiate between piety and sensuality in his music scores. These techniques were applied with such skill that a listener can identify these two themes through close listening. / DMus (Performance), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This study explores the manifestation of piety and sensuality in the operas Manon and Thaïs by Jules Massenet. These two themes are prevalent in Massenet’s operas as well as his oratorios, although it is not clear why this is so. His admiration and love for the human voice and his ability to compose beautiful melodies are reflected in the fact that he composed primarily for the lyric theatre. Piety and sensuality in Manon and Thaïs are articulated predominantly by the eponymous female characters. In order to understand the characters and the motivations that steer their lives, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the socio-historical context of piety and sensuality. This understanding was reached through means of a traditional literature review, which also shed light on the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist and its influence on Massenet and his work. This is a hermeneutic study conducted in light of an interpretive paradigm. The libretti of Manon and Thaïs were explored by means of a close reading to identify sections dominated by piety and sensuality. Following the example of Lawrence Kramer, a combination of close reading and analysis was used to look at the ways in which piety and sensuality are articulated in the music. It became clear that Massenet used various compositional techniques to differentiate between piety and sensuality in his music scores. These techniques were applied with such skill that a listener can identify these two themes through close listening. / DMus (Performance), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This thesis investigates the roles played by etymology in the work of three late modernist poet-critics: W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and Paul Muldoon. The relationship between poetry and etymology has a long history, but the advent of modern linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century brought about a change in this relationship. Structuralism developed a more comprehensive condemnation of the etymological fallacy – the view that historical forms and meanings are relevant to current ones - that both isolated etymology as an abstract field of study and undermined its scientific validity. One reaction to this state of affairs has been to re-evaluate etymological discourse itself as poetic or rhetorical. But it is the tension created by what Paula Blank has called 'the quasi-disciplinarity of etymological desire' that motivates Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon's concerns with linguistic historicity. Etymological poetry encourages, even necessitates, very close reading. While this thesis accepts the challenge to read arguably too closely, it also examines the limits of such an approach and its implications for the relationship between poetry and criticism. The first three chapters consider how Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon invoke etymologies in their own criticism, and how etymology affects the ways their poetry may be said to communicate. The second three develop these analyses into new interpretations of commonly debated aspects of their work: Auden's landscape poetry, Prynne's lyricism, and Muldoon's onomastics. It is argued that the fact of obsolescence is key to the etymological poetic; obsolete forms and meanings make poetry difficult, but in the process they intimate that a truer way of representing the world may be (re)discovered. All three poet-critics confront and absorb the consequences of etymological obscurity. Their preoccupation with the history of words is self-consciously and unavoidably pedantic, and it is this pedantry that plays the most significant role in the poetic power they accord to etymology.

Arguably, the impact of Darwinism on the novel is an indispensable part of the study of English literature. However, with regard to such literary study there is an ongoing aversion towards approaching Darwin outside the confines of his contemporaneous Victorian setting. This thesis explores what remains an extremely under-represented area of current scholarship; namely, the active status of Darwinism as an influence upon contemporary novelists. To address this gap, this study starts by conducting textual and comparative analyses of a representative selection of contemporary British novels, a literary field that, since 1990, has featured significant authors who have found in Darwin a source of intellectual and literary inspiration. The aim is to argue that Darwin's classic texts, and more recent incarnations of his theory such as Sociobiology, are deployed as a materialist discourse, used to subvert various problematic assumptions in the declining Postmodernist philosophy, the previously dominant theoretical paradigm. For novelists including Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt and Jenny Diski, Darwinism provides the tools to define human nature in an oppositional manner to the Social Constructivism which reduces the human to a blank slate ready for society's dictation. A universal human nature can be seen manifested in biological phenomena including competition, altruism, reproduction and aggression. The treacherous territory of biological determinism is still present, yet the desire to experiment is carried forward by McEwan in Enduring Love and Saturday into the realm of challenging traditional religion. In a more nuanced manner, Jim Crace's Being Dead manages to create a wholly naturalistic narrative of death. Finally, reinstating alterative meta-narratives is a practice that comes fully into its own in contemporary renditions of history. Byatt's Neo-Victorian novels, Possession and Morpho Eugenia, exhibit faith in knowing the past as if it were an evolutionary process of accumulated changes. Moreover, Diski's serio-ironic Monkey's Uncle is focused on how the present is haunted by the past in the form of immortal DNA coils. This study analyses the texts in a manner suggesting a paradigm shift in literary scholarship, where Darwin is no longer seen as simply an ideological threat. As the sciences continue to become more hermeneutically enigmatic, and as literature seems embedded in an elitist Postmodernist trajectory, there is now huge democratic potential in the New Darwinian Novel which invites the everyman of today to participate in the controversies of both disciplines.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the differences and similarities between the original version and an easy-to-read version of Selma Lagerlöfs novel Gösta Berlings saga. The method used is close reading of the two versions and thereby analysing descriptions of the environment, descriptions and psychological depth of the protagonist, missing chapters and changes of the plot. The results show that 21 chapters along with large parts from some of the remaining chapters are missing in the easy-to-read version due to not being necessary to the main story line. An alteration has been made in order to make the story line chronological. The use of invocation and personification of nature by Lagerlöf are missing in the easy-to-read version. There is also fewer details mentioned about the environments in the novel, which is resulting in the reader having to fill in the gaps on his own. The descriptions of the protagonist are few and over all quite similar, though some details are left out in the easy-to-read version and some clarifications have been made. There is a bigger difference between how thoughts and feelings are described in the texts, resulting in Gösta being a round and dynamic character in the original version and somewhat more flat and static in the easy-to-read version. These differances effect how a classroom discussion might be implemented, since the teacher must adjust the conversation so that it may be relevant for all participants.

This bachelor thesis discusses the concept of genre and the comic Gothic. It is an attempt to demonstrate the conflicts rooted in "genre" by discussing several scholars, such as Alistair Fowler and Mattias Fyhr with their works Kinds of Literature and De mörka labyrinterna respectively, and then problematise the "Gothic" as a genre and as a concept. Thus Avril Horner’s and Sue Zlosnik’s work Gothic and the Comic Turn is consulted through the discussion. The questions I ask are the following: What is a literary genre? How is the comic Gothic described by the researchers, and how does comic Gothic work in A. Lee Martinez’ novel Gil’s All Fright Diner (2005)? How can one use these questions in the classroom? The used methods in the thesis are genre analysis and close reading. I conclude that genre is a way to understand the relationship between a literary work and various conventions, such as environment and its contemporaries. Genre is also a tool for the reader to understand the traditions, history and other works the read text is related to. The comic inside the Gothic may appear and is as natural to the genre as horror and terror, since the Gothic is always close to self-parody. This can even be observed in the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). Furthermore, Gil’s All Fright Diner uses both the repertoire of classic Gothic and Horner’s and Zlosnik’s findings of the comic turn in the Gothic. Finally, the question regarding the definition of literary genre can be used in the classroom to widen students’ views on both genre itself and the prose they read. The comic Gothic can be used as an example on how genre can appear in different modes. Gil’s All Fright Diner is a thankful text for classroom readings due to its comic and gothic nature, and its contemporary language, themes and styles can make it relatable to students. There is therefore a potential in the concept of genre and the comic Gothic as subjects of discussion in the classroom.

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The aim of this essay is to examine how men is portrayed in three short stories, ”En omvändelsehistoria”, ”Far och son” and ”Jeppa”, from the debut Från Skåne by Victoria Benedictsson. I also investigate the ideas of masculinity during the 1880s. Unmanliness, paternity and manly tears are other concepts that I have been examining with close–reading as the method. The essay begins with a short recap of the earlier research about Benedictsson. Her debut as well as the perspective of masculinity on the work of female authors has been almost ignored by the academic sphere and my aim was to do something about it. Firstly, I discuss unmanliness in the peasant culture, secondly, paternity and absence and thirdly, unmanliness and manly tears. My result shows that the different ideas of masculinity affect the characters in many ways. For example, the elderly in the stories mostly falls down in unmanliness. I have come to the conclusion that the fear of being unmanly urge the men, or the boys, to act manly and follow the ideals.

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