This essay examines U.S. blackface performance in the twentieth century through the lens of Adorno's mass culture critiques, specifically of jazz music. Despite being rooted in the divisive logic of antiquated live performance traditions, blackface as a racist glyph flourishes in the technologically mediated social environment of the twentieth century. By replacing Adorno's critique of jazz with a direct investigation of blackface, the essay argues for a more materialist approach to minstrelsy studies that acknowledges both circulation and accumulation as oppressive hegemonic forces.

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 re-examines the writing of Raymond Williams. It has two goals. Firstly, it explores Williams's concept of cultural materialism, which theorises the role played by cultural forms in the creation and contestation of a national political order. Secondly, it extrapolates Williams's implicit critique of the unitary British state, and his theory of how cultural forms relate to that state. In Chapter One, I argue that Williams developed his theory of culture by combining a theoretical critique of national literary traditions with an interest in the emergent drama of nineteenth-century Scandinavia and twentieth-century Ireland and Wales. This theme is developed in Chapter Two, where I suggest that certain cultural and political experiences in Wales helped Williams to develop a cultural theory that was more generally applicable. Central to Williams's political aspirations was an attempt to expand and democratise the education system. In Chapter Three, I argue that Williams's novels can be understood as university fiction, providing examples of the kind of university he wished to develop. Since universities arose as institutions generating a sense of unified national culture during the imperial period, to re-think the work of the university is also to re-think the political make-up of the nation. This theme is expanded in Chapter Four, where I argue that Williams related the break-up of the British empire to the break-up of the British state, via devolution in Scotland and Wales. Williams theorised the part played by fiction and other cultural forms in enabling those nations to develop their own voices. He also showed that fiction could provide an imaginative critique of the unitary British state from a series of other perspectives, notably feminism and ethnic subcultures. Finally, in Chapter Five I argue that Raymond Williams can be understood as a film theorist, and demonstrate that a similar renegotiation of British identities occurs in contemporary film. An interest in the political make-up of the British state, and an attempt to develop alternative political and cultural formations, spanned Williams's career. This aspect of his work has hitherto received little critical attention. By discussing Williams in relation to the political break-up of Britain, this thesis makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Williams oeuvre.

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This paper takes a cultural materialist approach in analyzing the hegemonic purpose of using Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in American education. Ideas from critical race theory and Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, are used to reveal obfuscated aspects of Mockingbird’s narrative. These aspects have been repurposed to fit a Eurocentric palate, and have let the book achieve success under the guise of being a progressive and multiculturalist work. Mockingbird’s narration, marked by childlike innocence, has been used to obfuscate Eurocentric ignorance of racial and economic inequality. The text has also been used to divert blame from those in power onto those oppressed by a hegemonic system. Racism is in Mockingbird inaccurately described as an individual moral issue, rather than a system of discrimination which is deeply ingrained in every aspect of U.S. society. The liberal moderate ideology which informs Atticus character has historically been ignored due to his unquestionable, near-mythical position as a moral role model. The paper finds that Mockingbird has been used as part of a greater Eurocentric narrative which positions the Civil Rights Movement as a white movement of moral improvement.

This dissertation explores the life and works of eighteenth-century labouring-class poet Mary Leapor. Leapor’s ability to use everyday objects to write poetry that speaks to important social and cultural transformations of the period is one of the most remarkable and interesting aspects of her poetry, and it sets her apart from other labouring-class writers. Therefore, while this dissertation situates Leapor as a female laborer who writes poetry about the labour she performs, it is more interested in how she uses her poetry about the labour she performs—and particularly how she offers her own version of “thing theory”—in order to speak to a number of problems of which labour is just one. By spotlighting the complex role of objects in Leapor’s poetry, this dissertation shows how she uses those objects to articulate new conceptions of the labouring body’s relationship to authorship and authority, claim authorship as a form of useful labour, and legitimize her own gendered and class-inflected authority as a subject in literary and intellectual discourse. While acknowledging the context of material history, I focus on the ways Leapor uses particular things to rethink the possibilities of labouring-class life, identity, literary expression, and what it might have meant for her to imagine a new kind of human subjectivity that is itself inseparable from the concept of labour. Moreover, Leapor’s work shows that she identifies labouring individuals as part of a community whose experience is heavily organized socially around labour but argues that their lived experience has provided them with a particular identity and perspective. Ultimately, this dissertation works to decenter our own moment in the history of ideas by showing how Leapor was theorizing about forms of situated knowledge over two hundred years before it entered academic discourse in the 20th century through feminist theories of embodied ways of knowing. Leapor’s poetry is not just an object that should be studied through a theoretical lens; it should be understood as a theory of situated knowledge transmitting ideas from its own materially embedded position. Leapor’s poetry lives on as a labouring thing—changing, growing, and theorizing as living humans do—inviting its readers to contemplate the complex components of being an embodied thinker. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation focuses on the life and works of Mary Leapor (1722-1746) and builds upon recent interest in the cultural work of particular literary forms by examining the emergence of the labouring-class writer and the rise of a new poetic mode, the labour poem. Existing scholarship has begun to explore the many ways these texts represent class-based and gendered oppression, hardship, and work, and how these writers were able to combine several literary traditions to speak out against adverse conditions. By emphasising the material history of inanimate objects and nonhuman animals found within labouring-class writing, my project seeks to demonstrate how Leapor and other labouring-class writers used their poetry about the labours they performed in order to speak to something more than labour, such as what it means to be a subject in a world that is circumscribed by things like status, class and gender.

本文以解除神話性(de-mythicization) 的概念開啟對童話(fairy tales)的討論，認為必須加入歷史、文化、政治與物質等層面的解說才能擺脫童話中被添加的神話性並豐富童話的閱讀。接著以物質文明的角度切入女性主義經常閱讀的文本—貝侯的《灰姑娘》 (1697) 與電影《麻雀變鳳凰》(1990)，探討物質文明在兩個文本中所扮演的重要角色。 貝侯所擁護的現代主義(modernism)促使其改寫法國民間故事(folktales)，並在文中加入了大量的十七世紀法國當代物質文明，企圖重新塑造出新一代的法國文學。因此，貝侯的《灰姑娘》並非一般人所熟知的麻雀變鳳凰典型，而是一個關於恢復她貴族身分的故事。在貝侯筆下所塑造出來的灰姑娘與當時的時代背景息息相關：一個世故、聰明與積極的女性，試圖脫離她的苦難，並非大家所熟知的好心的、被動的、順從的灰姑娘形象。 電影《麻雀變鳳凰》則提供不同時代灰姑娘形象的對照。延續維多利亞時期在地化的灰姑娘形象，Vivian成為最低下的灰姑娘—流鶯。她由麻雀變鳳凰的經歷除了說明不同時代對美的詮釋與期待亦呈現出八零年代不同的灰姑娘形象：一個同時具有性感與善心的女性。 在美國，男子氣概的研究始於八零年代。因此本文以Edward的男性氣概為出發點，探討八零年代的物質文明，並以此看出對於男性的期待都建構在他的所有物，如轎車、總統套房以及馬球等等。此外，Edward身為男性灰姑娘與神仙教父的身分在本章皆有所探討。 最後必須闡明的是，物質文明並不見得能涵蓋所有的層面，尤其是在集體意識與個人偏好的部分，是無法找到一個平衡點的。本文僅能就現有的資料加以觀察與解析，以期達到較全面的觀察。 / To de-mythicize a fairy tale means to discover its cultural, historical and political aspects and therefore, in my thesis, it helps to distinguish Perrault’s Cendrillon (1697) from other Cinderella variants. My thesis approaches Perrault’s Cendrillon in a materialist method: with the employment of the late seventeenth-century French material culture, Cendrillon is transformed into a modernized literary fairy tale about her restoration to her original social status. This French Cinderella is quite distinct from the traditional rags-to-riches Cinderella story since Perrault champions a modernism with which he intends to change the future of the French literature. The film Pretty Woman (1990) is to serve as a contrast and to elucidate the idea that different eras make different Cinderella stories. The Cinderella in the Anglophone world is getting more and more debased and the Americanized Cinderella is the most debased ever, the street walker. Her rags-to-riches transformation manifests the social expectations toward in the eighties toward what a woman should be and possess. On the other hand, there is another side of the story in the film. On Edward’s part, I am going to approach the material culture via American masculinities in order to illustrate what a man should be and have. Besides, Edward also plays the roles of the male Cinderella and the fairy godfather in the film. The two roles Edward plays will be further developed in my thesis. The materialist approach has its own limits: it cannot include the conformist and the individualist aspects and I thus fail to incorporate it in my thesis.

The adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays in England continues to be complicated by his canonical status. This has led to the authority and value of productions of Shakespeare’s plays being assessed in terms of their fidelity or otherwise to the text, original performance conditions, and even Shakespeare’s intentions. The growing influence of performance studies offers a new way examine adaptations by focusing on adaptation as a creative process as well as a product. This opens up opportunities to examine how such ideological constructions of Shakespeare’s textual authority impact on the adaptation process. Whilst productions of Shakespeare’s plays by national, building-based companies such as the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe have received considerable analysis, those created by small, touring companies are less frequently considered. These small, non building-based companies have developed distinctive interdisciplinary artistic practices informed by creating and adapting a wide range of work for touring. This makes how such companies negotiate the dominant ideologies and dramatic conventions associated with performing Shakespeare in England at the beginning of the 21st century of particular interest. Employing textual and performance analysis, interviews with the adapters, and reference to reviews, this thesis examines the observable effects of constraints on three adaptations, understood here in both semantic senses as process and product. In doing so, it asks what are the observable effects of constraints on adaptation by the selected English touring companies, and how do these constraints interact with each company’s aesthetic approach to create meaning?

This essay is an attempt to conduct a reading of Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth through the lens of cultural materialism with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty as intertext. The essay conducts a brief survey of previous scholarly treatment of the play, explains the theoretical background of cultural materialism that the essay operates on, and briefly introduces the intertext. The treatment itself is based around the invocation of historical and mythical roots in the play, exploring the relevant parts of the intertext, interspersed with close reading of the play itself. The essay culminates in the understanding that the climax and ending of the play is not an end to the concept of liberty evoked in the play, but that it is a call to action for it. While the play offers no unproblematic image which could guide the direction of action, it does offer liberty as a guiding principle.