Nineteenth-century British authors, in particular, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Austen, often turned to orphaned children as a means to drive the plot of their novels. While struggles such as displacement were often accurately depicted, the abovementioned authors and their contemporaries often glossed over or completely disregarded the trauma and psychological implications felt by these orphans. As psychology gained prominence as a discipline through the works of Sigmund Freud and others, modern British literature saw a shift in its consideration of orphans and, additionally, emotionally absent mothers. This thesis will examine three modern British novels; Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and Graham Swift’s Waterland with respect to their exploration of the psychological and possible traumatic impact of their protagonists lives in a variety of disrupted family dynamics.

Easy Prey is a three-dimensional (3D) animated action comedy short film about stereotypes, expectations, and portrayals of strength that follows a ballerina as she is cornered in an alley. The fight that ensues expresses women's empowerment, physically and emotionally, by challenging preconceptions of ballerinas and the performance of femininity. This expression is founded on the intentional inclusion and exclusion of common cinematic tropes to efficiently convey key information while undermining common stereotypes. The action and atmosphere utilize classic film techniques to heighten and release tension. Easy Prey is inspired by my personal journey in healing my relationship with femininity and its societal performance, finding value and strength where I once felt shame and inferiority. In confronting preconceptions in this film, the viewer is encouraged to reflect upon their own biases and views on strength while being entertained.

This bachelor thesis in history consists of a case study of Per Olov Enquist’s documentary novel Legionärerna, which examines the Swedish extradition of Baltic soldiers after the Second World War. The intent of the study is to survey the novel’s use of history from a literary dimension. It does so by applying the typology of Hayden White, his poetics of history. This conceptual framework historicizes the historical writing by clarifying how the historical dictum is constructed in similar manner as fiction, and therefore dependent of its’ author. The result shows that Enquist uses the history – is constructing it – to object how one earlier has talked about the extradition by satire previous accounts and by reasoning contextual how one, instead, should understand the same historical phenomenon. These two aspects are linked to a third, viz, Enquist’s Maoist political stance.

In this thesis I focus on dismissivism in metaphysics. Some philosophers argue that at least some metaphysical disputes are not substantial, and as a consequence should be dismissed. In this work I restrict my attention to metaphysics and focus on debates about existence and grounding. In particular I am interested in finding out whether there is a difference between the possible options available for dismissing debates about what there is and the possible options available for dismissing debates about what grounds what. I will delve into this in two different steps. First of all I explore the possibility to dismiss debates about what there is, and as a case study I analyse the debate between three-dimensionalism and four-dimensionalism. Secondly I delve into whether it is possible to dismiss debates about what grounds what, thanks to the discussion of another case study, i.e. the debate between tropes ontologies and universals ontologies. It is worth exploring the nature of dismissivism, because it bears on the future of philosophy. If philosophy has to have a future, we have to make sure that at least some disagreements within it are substantial. My conclusions will be that metaphysical debates about what there is can be dismissed for a variety of reasons (semantic, epistemic, ...). I also argue there is no general formula to find out whether a specific debate should be dismissed. On the other hand I argue that debates about what grounds what should be dismissed. I offer two distinct arguments in favour of my claim. Firstly, I argue that disputants are having a verbal dispute when they talk about what grounds what, and thus their disagreement is non genuine. Secondly, I argue that the notion of grounding is underspecified, because it cannot be properly distinguished from causation.

The state of queer representation in games is poor, and queer consumers are growing increasingly vocal in their demands for nuanced portrayals. This thesis investigates how queer players perceive the tropes and stereotypes commonly used to portray them in games. By sorting through existing representation and using the most common tropes found, this study created two example characters which were represented both narratively and visually. These characters were then the subject of a study of 29 participants. The comments and opinions of these 29 participants were then analysed to find a largely negative consensus which is chiefly concerned with making portrayals less tragic. From this, this study proceeds to analyse the desires of queer consumers and contextualize them in relation to a world which still actively oppresses them.

This dissertation explores references to islands in 13th and 14th century Iberian literature in a corpus of encyclopedias, travel books and chivalry novels from 1223 through 1396. I explore how island geography became part of the Medieval imago mundi. Many Medieval readers were interested in these faraway lands where, they believed, monstrous races flourished, sea monsters lurked, and Paradise awaited to be rediscovered. The physical and human geography featured in these narratives, gave birth to an imaginary, utopian, exotic, extravagant, and mysterious concept of “islandness” located in idyllic places to be interpreted as cognitive maps of the social, politic and economic conventions of the era. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute with a new approach to Medieval Island Studies by means of a rhetorical analysis in geography through tropes (metaphor, synecdoche, metonym and irony) and fiction modes (romance, tragedy and comedy). This proposal assumes that the author-narrator is a self-aware geographer willing to satiate the desires and prejudices of its audience by constructing an attractive narrative that may stimulate a longing for this unattainable island world.

The work grafted hymnologies, a piece for chamber orchestra, explores connections between twentieth century formalist compositional techniques and formalist techniques of pretonal music. This document, which accompanies the score for the piece, provides an analysis of the work that explains the various techniques and their application to the music. This piece is composed in five large sections. The work pairs compositional techniques associated with pre-tonal music from those of twentieth century modernist music. For example, the second section employs the Medieval idea of tropes-- each time the melody is repeated, new melodic material is added, in the style of the elaborations to the Gregorian repertory that were common as early as the tenth century. This is paired with a single pitch class drone that evolves by timbral modulation, a technique influenced in part by Schoenberg and carried out exactingly by Elliot Carter. Each section contains a similar pairings, which are explained in detail herein. That these kinds of pairings could co-exist in a single piece seems natural; certainly, the intricate formalism that appeared in some Western concert music before 1600 exhibits a certain degree of aesthetic concurrence with the formalist music of the early to mid- twentieth century. Artistically, reaching back to the past (both near and far) and creating something new is an interesting exploration of how history can inform the creative process. / text

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Pages 19 to 23 have been omitted because of Revision / Elizabethan prose fiction has been virtually ignored for a long time. The question of rhetoric in this fiction is an extremely complex issue, and studies which have examined this aspect are usually stylistic analyses that fragment the works by dissecting isolated passages for stylistic data concerning an author's manipulation of particular schemes and tropes. This approach has often tended to ignore the possibility that larger ideals and attitudes may underlie the use of rhetorical figures (i.e. elocutio) in particular passages. While this dissertation does not attempt to resolve the problems of the relationship between rhetorical training in the grammar schools and Elizabethan fiction, or between the English vernacular rhetorics and Elizabethan fiction, it offers some idea about what these writers thought about rhetoric beyond its status as ornamentation. This thesis tries to discover what these writers thought about the possibilities of rhetorical training --that is, about its moral status as an art of persuasion. In my view, the major writers of Elizabethan prose fiction dramatize the abuses of verbal skills; they explore some of the techniques of deception, distortion and manipulation that are afforded by rhetorical training. The subject-matter of this fiction is largely concerned with verbal methods of persuasion that manipulate and distort, that rely on false logic and dishonesty; these writers are concerned with rhetorical attempts to change the face of the "real" world in order to justify a particular idea, action, or belief. My thesis explicates the prose fictional works of Gascoigne, Lyly, Sidney, Nashe and Deloney with this theory in mind. As well as suggesting the ways in which rhetoric is handled as a subject in a variety of fictional contexts, my thesis also explicates the rhetorical strategies which these authors themselves use to involve their reader in evaluating rhetoric. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Following a series of terrorist attacks, online communities for men built around misogyny and resistance to feminist values – commonly known as the manosphere – have recently become subject of scholarly attention. In research, the manosphere is usually explored as a phenomenon in the Western world, often described as a backlash movement in countries where gender equality is most progressive. This thesis seeks to widen the geographical borders of manosphere research by exploring discursive articulations of tropes related to the international manosphere on an open-access Bulgarian online Q&A platform. By choosing this platform as a case study, this project aims to fill a knowledge gap by exploring whether discourses fundamental to international, largely English-language communities of the manosphere are found relevant on a mainstream online space in an Eastern European, Balkan country like Bulgaria, and what (if any) additional locally specific tropes emerge in this context. Drawing on a discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis informed by social identity theory, the study seeks to unpack how these tropes serve the practice of online social identity construction, with a focus on whether the social identities that emerge could be classified as potentially extremist. The research problem is approached both by analyzing discursive elements in a purposeful sample of user comments, and by keeping a focus on the affordances of the online platform as a space where these discourses are co-produced and disseminated.