This thesis examines attitudes and approaches towards death, as well as aesthetic representations of death, in Anglo-Saxon hagiography. The thesis contributes to the discussion of the historical and intellectual contexts of hagiography and considers how saintly death-scenes are represented to form commentaries on exemplary behaviour. A comprehensive survey of death-scenes in Anglo-Saxon hagiography has been undertaken, charting typical and atypical motifs used in literary manifestations of both martyrdom and non-violent death. The clusters of literary motifs found in these texts and what their use suggests about attitudes to exemplary death is analysed in an exploration of whether Anglo-Saxon hagiography presents a consistent aesthetic of death. The thesis also considers how modern scholarly fields such as thanatology can provide fresh discourses on the attitudes to and depictions of ‘good' and ‘bad' deaths. Moreover, the thesis addresses the intersection of the hagiographic inheritance with discernibly Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards death and dying, and investigates whether or not the deaths of native Anglo-Saxon saints are presented differently compared with the deaths of universal saints. The thesis explores continuities and discontinuities in the presentations of physical and spiritual death, and assesses whether or not differences exist in the depiction of death-scenes based on an author's personal agenda, choice of terminology, approaches towards the body–soul dichotomy, or the gender of his or her subject, for example. Furthermore, the thesis investigates how hagiographic representations of death compare with portrayals in other literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, and whether any non-hagiographic paradigms provide alternative exemplars of the ‘good death'. The thesis also assesses gendered portrayals of death, the portrayal of last words in saints' lives, and the various motifs relating to the soul at the moment of death. The thesis contains a Motif Index of saintly death-scenes as Appendix I.

This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well. Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.

Using Gillian Beer's suggestion that literature and science 'share the moment's discourse' (Open Fields, 1996), this thesis explores the ideas associated with Albert Einstein's three revolutionary 1905 papers, examining the ways in which similar concepts appeared across disciplines during the early part of the twentieth century, and focusing in particular on their manifestation within the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. The study seeks to distinguish between instances of direct influence and a shared contemporary discourse, arguing that the analysis of both is essential to studies within the field of literature and science. Part I focuses on concepts of duality and complementarity, considering Max Planck's introduction of the quantum, Einstein's development of light quanta, Louis de Broglie's wave-particle duality and Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. It analyses other contemporary discussions of duality and complementarity, and explores Virginia Woolf's attempts to simultaneously express both sides of dualistic models, suggesting that Woolf is a complementary writer. Part II focuses on Einstein's theories of relativity, exploring D. H. Lawrence's adoption thereof in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in particular his claim that 'we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity'. It argues that this proposed theory is directly relevant to Lawrence's fictional works, both those that precede Fantasia and those that follow it. It also analyses the impact on Lawrence of contemporary ideas of relativism, especially those of William James as expressed in Pragmatism (1907). Part III explores the ways in which both Woolf and Lawrence write about individuals within crowds. It considers the possible links between such scenes and Einstein's paper on Brownian motion as well as contemporary studies of crowd psychology. It suggests that individual characters within modernist works can be considered as similar to the individual particles suspended in a mass which exhibit Brownian motion.

This thesis examines the production of the Middle English poetic manuscript. It analyses the mise-en-page of manuscripts created during a crucial period for book production, immediately after 1400, when there was a sudden explosion in the production of vernacular manuscripts of literary texts, when the demand for books increased, and the commercial book trade swiftly followed. It offers a close analysis of the mise-en-page of the manuscripts of three central authors: Chaucer’s, Gower’s, and Hoccleve’s manuscripts were at the heart of this sudden flourishing and were, crucially, produced when scribal methods for creating the literary page were still unformed. Previous studies have focused on the localised readings produced by single scribes, manuscripts, or authors, offering a limited examination of broader trends. This study offers a wider comparison: where individual studies offer localised analysis, the multi-textuality of this thesis offers broader perceptions of book production and of scribal responses to the new literary texts being produced. In analysing the layout of seventy-six manuscripts, including borders, initials, paraphs, rubrics, running titles, speaker markers, glosses and notes, this thesis argues that scribes were deeply concerned with creating a manuscript page specifically to showcase texts of poetry. The introduction outlines current scholarship on mise-en-page and defines the scribe as one who offers an individual response to the text on the page within the context of the inherited, commercial, and practical practices of layout. The three analytical chapters address the placement of the features of mise-en-page in each of the seventy-six manuscripts, each chapter offering three contrasting manuscript situations. Chapter 1 analyses the manuscripts of Chaucer, who left no plan for the look of his page, causing scribes to make decisions on layout that illuminate fifteenth-century scribal responses to literature. These are then compared to the manuscripts of Gower in Chapter 2, directly or indirectly supervised by the poet, which display rigorous uniformity in their layout. This chapter argues that scribes responded in much the same way, despite the strict control over meaning. Chapter 3 focuses on Hoccleve’s autograph manuscripts which are unique in demonstrating authorial control over layout. This chapter compares the autograph to the non-autograph manuscripts to argue that scribal responses differed from authorial intentions. Each of the three chapters analyses the development of mise-en-page specifically for literary texts. Focussing on the mise-en-page, this thesis is able to compare across a range of texts, manuscripts, scribes, and authors to mount a substantial challenge to current perceptions that poetic manuscripts were laid out in order to assist readers’ understanding of the meaning of the texts they contain. Instead, it argues that though there was a concern with representing the nuances of poetic meaning, often scribal responses to poetry were bound up with presenting poetic form.

This dissertation discusses the complicated relationship (known as the comitatus) of kings and followers as presented in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. The anonymous poets of the age celebrated the ideals of their culture but consistently portrayed the real behavior of the characters within their works. Other studies have examined the ideals of the comitatus in general terms while referring to the poetry as a body of work, or they have discussed them in particular terms while referring to one or two poems in detail. This study is both broader and deeper in scope than are the earlier works. In a number of poems I have identified the heroic ideals and examined the poetic treatment of those ideals. In order to establish the necessary background, Chapter I reviews the historical sources, such as Tacitus, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the work of modern historians. Chapter II discusses such attributes of the king as wisdom, courage, and generosity. Chapter III examines the role of aristocratic women within the society. Chapter IV describes the proper behavior of followers, primarily their loyalty in return for treasures earlier bestowed. Chapter V discusses perversions and failures of the ideal. The dissertation concludes that, contrary to the view that Anglo-Saxon literature idealized the culture, the poets presented a reasonably realistic picture of their age. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry celebrates ideals of behavior which, even when they can be attained, are not successful in the real world of political life.

This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.

This thesis investigates a subset of the lexical items which appear to be involved in the phenomenon of conversion in English. In its most canonical form, conversion involves pairs or sets of word forms which share both their phonological (and orthographic) form as well as some element of meaning, but which seem to belong to di↵erent word classes. In this study, the focus is on the relationships (or lack thereof) between monosyllabic verbal and nominal forms in conversion pairs. The investigation takes as a starting point the patterns of linguistic behaviour within and across these pairs. The situation which is revealed is complex, but not unsystematic. Instead, it is shown that in many cases, the relationship between the nominal and verbal forms is clearly asymmetrical. In contrast to these clearer patterns, however, there are also a number of cases wherein the relationship appears to be more symmetrical in nature. In view of the complexity of the situation, the question of how to best model the linguistic behaviour of such forms has been a subject of some debate in the literature. A variety of theoretical explanations for these relationships have been proposed, though none has managed to account for the wide range of data. This study therefore suggests a mixed model, in which asymmetrically-related forms are involved in a derivational morphological process, while symmetrical forms represent inflected forms of a single lexeme which lacks a specification of word class. However, given the fertile – and in no way settled – research background, the primary contribution of this study is an experimental exploration of how these forms and the relationships between them might be synchronically represented in the mental grammar of current speakers. To that end, three behavioural experiments are conducted with a view to uncovering how di↵erent types of conversion items are processed, and how information about their processing might inform our theoretical understanding. The results of these experiments suggest that the processing of these forms is indeed in line with the patterns of symmetry and asymmetry found in their linguistic behaviour, and suggests that some conversion pairs may be involved in a derivational process, while others may not be pairs at all but rather a single, underspecified lexical entry. However, in addition to the results concerning the forms which display clearer patterns of behaviour, it is suggested that the patterns across the phenomenon of conversion as a whole may best be understood as a continuum, rather than all suggesting a single underlying pattern of mental representation.

Este trabalho consiste de uma tradução versificada de A Batalha de Maldon, poema anglo-saxão no metro tradicional, composto no século X-XI a respeito da batalha homônima entre dinamarqueses e anglo-saxões. Seu pressuposto fundamental é um estudo das abordagens de tradução aplicáveis à poesia germânica antiga para a produção de uma versão anotada em português, com a qual se procura reconstituir as características do poema antigo. Esta abordagem leva aos argumentos finais acerca desta possibilidade, em especial no que diz respeito à aliteração em português. / This work consists in a verse translation from the Anglo-saxon of The Battle of Maldon, old English poem written between the 10th and 11th centuries about the battle between Danes and Saxons. The main goal is the study of different translation theories which are related to the old Germanic poetic tradition as a mean to provide a Portuguese language annotated version where the poem\'s traits are reconstructed. This procedure leads to the final argument, on the possibility of achieving alliteration in Portuguese.

I examine those linguistic features of Old English and Old Norse which serve as the basic elements for the metrical systems of those languages. I begin with a critical survey of recent work on Old English metrical theory in chapter 1, which suggests that the four-position and word-foot theories of metre are the most viable current frameworks. A further conclusion of this chapter is that stress is not, as is often claimed, a core element of the metre. In chapter 2, I reassess the phonological-metrical phenomenon of Kaluza's law, which I find to be much more regular and widely applicable within Bēowulf than has previously been recognized. I further argue that the law provides evidence that Old English phonological foot structure is based on a preference for precise bimoraism. In chapter 3, I examine the role of syllables in the Norse Eddic metre fornyrðislag, which supports a view of resolution and phonological feet similar to that found in Old English, though Norse prosody is much more tolerant of degenerate, light feet. I reconsider the other major Eddic metre, ljóðaháttr, in chapter 4, integrating the insights of Andreas Heusler and Geoffrey Russom to propose a new system of scansion for this notoriously recalcitrant verse form. This scansion provides important support for the word-foot theory, and suggests that linguistic elements larger than syllables or phonological feet play a crucial role in early Germanic verse. In the final chapter, I give a diachronic account of Germanic metre and relevant linguistic structures, arguing that the word-foot theory provides the best metrical framework for understanding the development of Germanic alliterative verse. This metrical system is linguistically supported by Germanic word structures and compounding rules, and interacts with bimoraic phonological feet, all of which have a long history in Proto- and pre-Germanic.

Das Dissertationsprojekt befasst sich mit der australischen Autorin Dymphna Cusack, deren Popularität in Ost und West zwischen 1955 und 1975 ihren Höhepunkt erreichte. In diesem Zeitraum wurde sie nicht nur in den westlichen Industriestaaten, in Australien, England, Frankreich und Nord Amerika viel gelesen, sondern auch in China, Russland, der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und in vielen Sowjetrepubliken. Im Verlauf ihres Schaffens wurde ihr grosse Anerkennung für ihren Beitrag zur australischen Literatur zuteil; sie erhielt die &bdquo;Commonwealth Literary Pension&ldquo;, die &bdquo;Queen&prime;s Silver Jubilee Medal&ldquo; und 1981 den &bdquo;Award of her Majesty&ldquo;. Trotz dieser Unterstützung durch den Staat in Australien und England äusserte Cusack immer wieder feministische, humanistisch-pazifistische, und anti-faschistisch bzw. pro-sowjetische Sozialkritik. <br /> Sie war auch für ihren starken Nationalismus bekannt, plädierte dafür, eine &bdquo;einheimische&ldquo; Literatur und Kultur zu pflegen. Besonders das australische Bildungssystem war das Ziel ihrer Kritik, basierend auf ihren Erfahrungen als Lehrerin in städtischen und ländlichen Schulen, die sie ihrer Autobiographie beschrieb. 'Weder ihr Intellekt, noch ihre Seele oder ihre Körper wurden gefördert, um ganze Männer oder ganze Frauen aus ihnen zu machen. Besonders letztere wurden vernachlässigt. Mädchen wurden ermutigt, ihren Platz dort zu sehen, wo deutsche Mädchen ihn einst zu sehen hatten: bei Kindern, Küche, Kirche.' Cusack engagierte sich stark für Bildungsreformen, die das Versagen australischer Schulen, das erwünschte liberal-humanistische Subjekt zu herauszubilden, beheben sollten. <br /> Der liberale Humanismus der Nachkriegszeit schuf ein populäres Bedürfnis nach romantischem Realismus, den man in Cusacks Texten finden kann. Um verstehen zu können, wie Frauen sich zwischen &bdquo;Realismus und Romanze&ldquo; verfingen, biete ich eine Dekonstruktion von Geschlecht innerhalb dieses &bdquo;hybriden&ldquo; Genres an. Mittels feministischer Methodik können Einblicke in die konfliktvolle Subjektivität beider Geschlechter in verschiedenen historischen Perioden gewonnen werden: die Zeit zwischen den Kriegen, während des Pazifischen Krieges und den Weltkriegen, während des Kalten Krieges, zur Zeit der Aborigine-Bewegung, des Vietnamkrieges, sowie zu Beginn der zweiten feministischen Bewegung in den siebziger Jahren. Eine Rezeptionsanalyse des romantischen Realismus und der Diskurse, die diesen prägen, sind in Kapitel zwei und drei untersucht. <br /> Die Dekonstruktion von Weiblichkeit und eines weiblichen Subjekts ist in Kapitel vier unternommen, innerhalb einer Diskussion der Art und Weise, wie Cusacks romantischer Erzählstil mit dem sozialen Realismus interagiert. Nach der Forschung von Janice Radway, werden Cusacks Erzählungen in zwei Tabellen unterteilt: die Liebesgeschichte versagt, ist erfolgreich, eine Parodie oder Idealisierung (s. &bdquo;Ideal and Failed Romances&ldquo;; &bdquo;Primary Love Story Succeeds or Fails&ldquo;). Unter Einbeziehung von Judith Butlers philosophischem Ansatz in die Literaturkritik wird deutlich, dass diese Hybridisierung der Gattungen das fiktionale Subjekt davon abhält, ihr/sein Geschlecht &bdquo;sinnvoll&ldquo; zu inszenieren. Wie das &bdquo;reale Subjekt&ldquo;, der Frau in der Gesellschaft, agiert die fiktionale Protagonistin in einer nicht intelligiblen Art und Weise aufgrund der multiplen Anforderungen an und den Einschränkungen für ihr Geschlecht. <br /> Demnach produziert die geschlechtliche Benennung des Subjektes eine Vielfalt von Geschlechtern: Cusacks Frauen und Männer sind geprägt von den unterschiedlichen und konfliktvollen Ansprüchen der dichotom gegenübergestellten Genres. Geschlecht, als biologisches und soziales Gebilde, wird danach undefinierbar durch seine komplexen und inkonsistenten Ausdrucksformen in einem romantisch-realistischen Text. Anders gesagt führt die populäre Kombination von Liebesroman und Realismus zu einer Überschreitung der Geschlechtsbinarität, die in beiden Genres vorausgesetzt wird. <br /> Weiterführend dient eine Betrachtung von Sexualität und Ethnie in Kapitel fünf einer differenzierteren Analyse humanistischer Repräsentationen von Geschlecht in der Nachkriegsliteratur. Die Notwendigkeit, diese Repräsentationen in der Populär- und in der Literatur des Kanons zu dekonstruieren, ist im letzten Kapitel dieser Dissertation weiter erläutert. / In her lifetime, Dymphna Cusack continually launched social critiques on the basis of her feminism, humanism, pacificism and anti-fascist/pro-Soviet stance. Recalling her experi-ences teaching urban and country schoolchildren in A Window in the Dark, she was particularly scathing of the Australian education system. Cusack agitated for educational reforms in the belief that Australian schools had failed to cultivate the desired liberal humanist subject: 'Neither their minds, their souls, nor their bodies were developed to make the Whole Man or the Whole Woman - especially the latter. For girls were encouraged to regard their place as German girls once did: Kinder, Küche, Kirche - Children, Kitchen and Church.' I suggest that postwar liberal humanism, with its goals of equality among the sexes and self-realisation or 'becoming Whole', created a popular demand for the romantic realism found in Cusack&prime;s texts. This twentieth century form of humanism, evident in new ideas of the subject found in psychoanalysis, Western economic theory and Modernism, informed each of the global lobbies for peace and freedom that followed the destruction of World War II. <br /> Liberal ideas of the individual in society became synonymous with the humanist representations of gender in much of postwar, realistic literature in English-speaking countries. The individual, a free agent whose aim was to 'improve the life of human beings', was usually given the masculine gender. He was shown to achieve self-realisation through a commitment to the development of &ldquo;mankind&rdquo;, either materially or spiritually. Significantly, the majority of Cusack&prime;s texts diverge from this norm by portraying women as social agents of change and indeed, as the central protagonists. <br /> Although the humanist goal of self-realisation seems to be best adapted to social realism, the generic conventions of popular romance also have humanist precepts, as Catherine Belsey has argued. The Happy End is contrived through the heroine&prime;s mental submission to her physical desire for the previously rejected or criticised lover. As Belsey has noted, desire might be considered a deconstructive force which momentarily prevents the harmonious, permanent unification of mind and body because the body, at the moment of seduction, does not act in accord with the mind. In popular romance, however, desire usually leads to a relationship or proper union of the protagonists. <br /> <br /> In Cusack&prime;s words, the heroine and hero become &ldquo;whole men and women&rdquo; through the &ldquo;realistic&rdquo; love story. Thus romance, like realism, seeks to stabilise gender relations, even though female desire is temporarily disruptive in the narrative. In the end, women and men become fully realised characters according to the generic conventions of the love story or the consummation of potentially subversive desire. It stayed anxieties associated with women seeking independence and self-realisation rather than traditional romance which signalled a threat to existing gender relations.<br /> <br /> I proposed that an analysis of gender in Cusack&prime;s fiction is warranted, since these apparently unified, humanist representations of romantic realism belie the conflicting aims and actions of the gendered subjects in this historical period. For instance, when we examine women&prime;s lives immediately after the war, we can identify in both East and West efforts initiated by women and men to reconstruct private/public roles. In order to understand how women were caught between &ldquo;realism and romance&rdquo;, I plan to deconstruct gender within the paradigm of this hybrid genre. <br /> <br /> By adopting a femininist methodology, new insights may be gained into the conflictual subjectivity of both genders in the periods of the interwar years, the Pacific and World Wars, the Cold War, the Australian Aboriginal Movement at the time of the Vietnam War, as well as the moment of second wave Western feminism in the seventies. My definition of romantic realism and the discourses that inform it are examined in chapters two and three. A deconstruction of femininity and the female subject is pursued in chapter four, when I argue that Cusack&prime;s romantic narratives interact in different ways with social realism: romance variously fails, succeeds, is parodic or idealised. Applying Judith Butler&prime;s philosophical ideas to literary criticism, I argue that this hybridisation of genre prevents the fictional subject from performing his or her gender. <br /> <br /> Like the &ldquo;real&rdquo; subject - actual women in society - the fictional protagonist acts in an unintelligible fashion due to the multifarious demands and constraints on her gender. Consequently, the gendering of the sexed subject produces a multiplicity of genders: Cusack&prime;s women and men are constituted by differing and conflicting demands of the dichotomously opposed genres. Thus gender and sex become indefinite through their complex, inconsistent expression in the romantic realistic text. In other words, the popular combination of romance and realism leads to an explosion of the gender binary presupposed by both genres. Furthermore, a consideration of sexuality and race in chapter five leads to a more differentiated analysis of the humanist representations of gender in postwar fiction. The need to deconstruct these representations in popular and canonical literature is recapitulated in the final chapter of this Dissertation.