This study will look at fantasies of the mechanical body in a series of close readings of key modernist and contemporary texts. It will argue that these texts are sites of resistance or repression, in which unconscious and / or cultural narratives about the death drive have left their traces. Part One, Chapters 1-3, explores the links between war and fantasy, and between fantasy and gender. Chapter One looks at the art and writings of the Italian Futurists and English Vorticists, with the focus on Marinetti and Lewis, to consider how the rationalized bodies of the soldier and worker might be seen as the covert problems underpinning the fantasy, returning to it in the form of the repressed. Chapter Two concerns the writings of Ernst Jünger, where war, modern labour, the incursion of danger into everyday life, and photography are seen to provide signs of the emergence of the Typus, an organic construction, who has learnt to see himself as devoid of feeling, turning the death drive into the will to power in acts of aggression, and for whom the function of the eye is the same as that of the weapon. Chapter Three investigates the problem of war-shock and the shocks of cinema in First World War film footage of shellshocked soldiers, Lang's Metropolis, and Chaplin's Modern Times. It shows how discourses of hysteria, feminization and commodity relations form the common ground between the cultural reception of both shelishock and cinema, and how film-makers and critics responded to both sets of debates. Part Two, Chapters 4-5, explores the links between the machine, the maternal body and the death drive in the Terminator and Alien films, and considers the question of affect, mourning, and identification in Cronenberg's Crash.

Contemporary north-west Bangladesh is the scene of a religious contest between the self-described 'Hanafis‘, who include various expressions of Islamic faith and practice, and Salafi reformist groups known as Ahl-i-Hadith. Occasionally labelled 'Wahhabis‘ due to their affinity with the doctrine from Arabia, the Ahl-i-Hadith actively seek to purify local Islam of all practices which they consider to be bidaʿ. Local Hanafi Muslims, who form a majority, are resistant to these efforts at total religious reform. This thesis investigates the contemporary discourse taking place between these two communities in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, and between these groups and their authoritative Islamic texts. The case study used to focus on inter-group debates is the contested issue of whether or not to perform rituals meant to assist the dead during al-barzakh – the conscious waiting period in the grave believed to last from death until the day of resurrection. Especially during a soul‘s first forty days in al-barzakh, the Hanafi community observes rituals intended to reduce the torment of the grave and send soʾab, or merit, to the account of the deceased. Participant observation at numerous milad, chollisha and khotom ceremonies for the dead, as well as interviews with local ʿulamaʾ and other informants highlight the progress of Ahl-i-Hadith reform efforts, but also the way in which Hanafi leaders defend and interpret their 'unorthodox‘ practices using authoritative Sunni hadith and Qurʾanic passages. Additional Islamic texts which are locally influential are examined. Special voice is given to "what Muslims say" in an attempt to let the words and actions of those involved in the debates direct the research agenda as they interpret and defend their respective positions. This thesis provides other researchers with a field-based account of contemporary Islamic belief and practice in Bangladesh – an understudied Islamic context containing over 150 million people. Dozens of quotations from ʿulamaʾ are reproduced in the original Bengali and in English. Additionally, this study complicates Islamic fundamentalist and Western scholarly conceptions of 'popular Islam‘ and 'syncretism‘ by showing that Hanafi ʿulamaʾ in Rajshahi explain their (contested) beliefs and activities in Islamic terms, using universally recognised Sunni sources of authority, especially the hadith literature.

This thesis discusses female silence, voice and representation as portrayed in four postcolonial novels written by Asian female writers or those from the Asian diaspora. The novels included in the corpus are The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo, Brick Lane by Monica Ali and Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne. This thesis aims to explore the different strategies adopted by the authors to represent different forms of silence of the type highlighted in theoretical work by Spivak, Olsen and Showalter. The novels analysed open up new contexts in which issues of silence, migration, displacement and multiculturalism, which are central in postcolonial literature, are explored. In its examination of these issues in detail, the thesis has been influenced by postcolonial and diasporic studies, with a focus on women’s issues and feminist thought. Instead of focusing on the role of silence solely in relation to specific characters, the thesis attempts to engage with the complex ways in which these narratives represent various forms, moments and scenes of silence. From the analysis, we can exemplify that the novels can also be used to suggest the ambivalences of speaking/not-speaking via the narrative representations of silence. Authorial silence involves the author’s deliberate refusal to speak directly in the text ; instead, the author utilises several literary devices to convey something indirectly to the reader. Silence is also linked to concepts such as shame, secrets and gossip. One is likely to refrain from speaking if he or she is ashamed, secretive or is the topic of gossip in one’s community. There are also some female characters who are portrayed as not-speaking, or choosing to remain silent so as not to cause problems for the family. A few other characters have been portrayed as refusing to speak out as they have been traumatised into silence. Lastly, women can also be complicit in holding on to patriarchal structures and in the process, attempt to speak out in order to to silence or to cause problems to other women.

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This thesis investigates how the burial chamber of the 8th Dynasty pyramid of king Qakare Ibi at Saqqara in Egypt (c. 2109-2107 B.C.) was inscribed. It uses a holistic approach to focus on the textual programme and its unusual aspects in comparison to older pyramids. In doing so, it addresses issues of textual transmission and of scribal practice in the process of inscribing the walls of subterranean chambers in pyramids. The aim is to contextualise the texts of Ibi within the Memphite tradition of Pyamid Texts and the development of mortuary literature on different media from the late third millennium BCE Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom in the early second millennium BCE. The first chapter presents the background to this research and information on king Ibi and his pyramid. The second chapter treats research on the arrangement of the texts on the walls of subterranean chambers of royal pyramids of kings and queens and compares the layout of the texts in the pyramid of Ibi with older pyramids. It then discusses in detail one section on the east wall of Ibi, where the order of spells diverges from other transmitted sequences. The unusual combination of spells and the practice of shortening spells is investigated further in the third chapter, where two sections of texts on the south wall are analysed. The fourth chapter explores garbled texts and discusses processes of copying and inscribing the texts onto the walls of pyramids. The fifth chapter analyses the modifications of the writing system in pyramids, especially the mutilation of hieroglyphs, and how this practice relates to the tradition of altering signs in pyramids. Finally, the sixth chapter synthesises the results of the preceding chapters in two sections. The first section summarises the process of inscribing pyramids and contextualises aspects of scribal practices within it. The second section concludes the thesis with a discussion of the features of the textual programme of Ibi and of how it relates to the broader transmission of mortuary literature.

The first part of the thesis presents didactically transformed interpretation about Jan Neruda, his life and work, and about Povídky malostranské as a part of the complex. There is general information about the cycle of short stories. The process of creating of this work and also the themes are outlined here (distinctive features of Povídky malostranské), which could be used at school. Lessons can be focused on the characters, narrative style, or spacetime. In the following chapters there are the basic facts about Czech pubescent readers, the evaluation of structured interviews with primary school teachers about their experiences and the way how to work with Povídky malostranské there is summarized knowledge about the way how the authors handle the topic of Povídky malostranské of reading-books. The three model lessons based on the working with the texts (each lesson is focused on one of the distinctive features of this work) are the important part of this thesis. These lessons were taught at elementary school, therefore they are provided with the evaluation.