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The status of ‘Shakespeare’ is an incredibly intricate cultural construct, which is influenced by circumstantially contingent hierarchies of value, academic discourses, institutional processes, educational curricula, and media techniques. Having explored the context in which Shakespeare currently stands as an icon through the review of existing scholarship, this thesis employs a combined methodology to facilitate an investigation of some of the ways in which the playwright and his works are significant in contemporary culture, by specifically examining three late-1990s Shakespearean films and some particular types of audience responses. The case studies – Romeo + Juliet, Shakespeare in Love and 10 Things I Hate About You – are each analysed, according to their individual content and context, as cinematic products, which are understood in relation to Shakespeare and also many other cultural frameworks. It is acknowledged that Shakespeare has a particularly potent and established iconicity within academia and the education system, and it is argued that this position informs, but is also modified and challenged by, the filmic conceptualisations. These observations are enriched and developed by the findings of empirical audience research. Questionnaires were used to elicit a mixture of quantitative and qualitative information from secondary school teachers of Shakespeare, and from first year English and/or media undergraduates, about their experiences and opinions of Shakespeare in contemporary culture, especially Shakespearean films. Patterns identifiable in the data generated confirm that cinematic interpretations can transform the cultural currency of Shakespeare, reducing the distance between young people and the text by using familiar modes of address, but also point to tensions stemming from a disjunction of conventional evaluative criteria and the diverse ways in which Shakespeare now functions in mass culture. This work therefore contributes to debates about Shakespeare’s cultural status by examining the complex processes of negotiation of meaning that are discernable in these instances.

This thesis investigates British fictional representations of India in novels, plays and poetry from 1772 to 1823. Rather than simply correlating literary portrayals to shifting colonial context and binary power relationships, the project relates representations to the impact of India on British popular culture, and print capitalism’s role in defining and promulgating national identity and proto-global awareness. The study contends that the internal historical development of the literary modes – the stage play, the novel and verse – as well as consumer expectations, were hugely influential in shaping fictional portrayals of the subcontinent. In addition, it argues that the literary representations of India were contingent upon authors’ gender, class and their lived or lack of lived experience in the subcontinent. The project seeks to use literary texts as case studies to explore the growing commoditisation of culture, the developing literary marketplace and an emerging sense of national identity. The thesis proposes that the aforementioned discourses and anxieties are embodied within the very literary forms of British India narratives. In addition, it seeks to determine shifts in how Britain’s relationship with the subcontinent was imagined and how events in colonial India were perceived by the general public. Furthermore, the project utilises literary texts as sites to explore the discursive and epistemological strategies that Britons engaged in to either justify or confront their country’s role as a colonising nation.

This dissertation explores the beliefs of students on the relevance (if at all) of addressing the Fifth skill, culture, in English education in a Pakistani context, with sub question that aims to answer what definitions of the Fifth skill (Tomalin, 2008) could be appropriate to English education in a Pakistani context? So far the research done on English language teaching in Pakistan and anything related to it is based on teachers’ beliefs alone, therefore it was important for me as an English Language teacher to find out what the students attitudes were towards the integration of 5th skill in the classroom. However, I did not limit the research to students’ beliefs alone; my research also includes the perception of the teachers. This is not only to give validity to the research, but also to realize any differences regarding the teachers’ beliefs on the issue in previous researches. To explore the role of 5th skill in teaching English languages in a Pakistani classroom, at the secondary level, this dissertation collected the responses elicited from both the students and the teacher through a semi-structured questionnaire and focus group discussion, and a thematic analysis was carried out. The results of this study highlight a number of issues regarding cultural acceptance, language acceptance and integrating of 5th skill in language teaching. Certain interesting contradictions regarding English culture(s) and English language and their status in Pakistani society also emerged. The findings suggest that students regarded the 5th skill as an essential source for better understanding the concepts and their functional use of English language, as it presents them with real life situations. However, where the 5th skill was seen as an important tool to enhance language competence, the students also supported that both the students’ culture as well as the culture associated with English Language be incorporated in the language class. The students saw integrating 5th skill in a language class as a means to express their ideas, values and experiences, and an opportunity to make others understand them and their point of view, and not restrict the use of Fifth skill to a one way cultural awareness stream only. The dissertation also questioned the current status of English as a second language as perceived by the students and its implications on the future of English Language teaching in Pakistan.

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Travel is an adventure into a new unexplored culture, different from what surrounds the traveler in the usual life at home. Culture is reflected not only in architecture, food, and literature but also in social relationships. How people react to everything they hear and see is based on the characteristics of their cultures. During travel, there is a clash of multiple cultures in the faces of tourists and tourism workers. The workers are the people presenting their culture to the tourists, but how does culture itself affect the working conditions of these people? The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between cultural norms and the working conditions of workers in the tourism industry. To achieve the purpose of this paper, the cases of Sweden and Turkey were used, since their cultures are fundamentally different from each other. The result of this study showed that Turkish culture is largely based on social relationships and not on following regulations, which leads to corruption and disregard for labor laws. On the other hand, Swedish culture is rule-based, and these characteristics have a beneficial influence on the enforcement of labor laws. The information obtained as a result of this work can be used to study and understand how culture affects the state of working conditions and how the relationship between tourists and tourism workers differs depending on their cultural characteristics.